Sonia sotomayor autobiography reviews
Poor kid makes good. It&#;s an old story&#;maybe the quintessential story of America. My Beloved World, the new memoir by Sonia Sotomayor, is a charming addition to the genre. What gives it unusual interest is that the author is a Supreme Court justice of Puerto Rican descent who (by her own admission) has benefited from racial preferences&#;and it is published just as Sotomayor and her fellow justices are weighing a new constitutional challenge to racial preferences in college admissions in Fisher v. University of Texas. My Beloved World is interesting both for what it says and what it does not say about race relations in America today.
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In classic fashion for a Horatio Alger story, Sotomayor begins her memoir with a gripping incident highlighting the difficulties she faced. Her parents are fighting&#;as usual&#;but this time her mother is raging at her father because his alcoholism now makes him tremble so badly that he cannot administer the insulin shot that the diabetic seven-year-old Sonia needs every day. Determined that her parents at least not fight over her, Sonia picks up the needle and, with guidance from her mother (herself a practical nurse whose work schedule does not always permit her to administer the shot), she learns to inject the shot herself. From this experience Sonia learns a most important lesson: she can&#;t rely on others but must care for herself.
Succeeding pages reveal more adversity. Her father dies from his addiction when Sonia is nine and her brother Junior is six. Her mother&#;s income barely sustains an adequate living. Her father&#;s death ends her parents&#; rows, but her mother grows distant, withdrawing to her bedroom for hours until Sonia finally bangs on her door and insists that her mother rejoin her children. Her South Bronx neighborhood is plagued by crime and drugs.
Still, there is much that&#;s positive in Sonia&#;s childhood. Above all is her Abuelita&#;&#;little grandmother&#;&#;who gives Sonia the unstin This inspiring memoir is about overcoming adversity, having faith in yourself, and not allowing your circumstances to determine who you should be or where you end up. The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor invites children to dream big! The storytelling feels genuine as Sotomayor draws the reader into her private world, opening up and talking about real-life situations that let us see her as a human being. She identifies with the same struggles we all experience and talks at length about her insecurities, struggles, and core beliefs. She also continuously emphasizes the importance of her Puerto Rican roots, her strong family bonds, and invaluable close friendships. We learn about the impact of her work, which led to her historic appointment as the first Latina Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in , a role she has held ever since. Her story shows that regardless of your circumstances, dreams do come true and happy endings are possible. This is not just a story of a plucky girl succeeding; in weaving her complicated story and giving credit to those who helped her to understand how to think critically and how to develop her own moral philosophy, Sonia Sotomayor never forgets that luck and serendipity also play a part. My Beloved World bySonia Sotomayor, Knopf, pages, $ By Roberta Silman One of the reasons I love to write for The Arts Fuse is that its editor, Bill Marx, often sends me worthy books that don’t get much attention elsewhere. And when I find something I really love, I feel like an explorer breaking new ground—or really more like I imagine Keats felt discovering Chapman’s Homer. How many wonderful books there are out there that few people seem to know. And how good to be able to review them. Yet once in a very great while the book that everyone is reading and buying turns out to fulfill all your expectations. That is the case with Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir, My Beloved World, which she wrote with the help of Zara Housmand. What makes the book so remarkable is the intangible thing that makes Sotomayor so remarkable. All the ingredients of her childhood could be regarded as difficult: her parents came from Puerto Rico in the &#;40s and married and settled in the south Bronx, but within a few years after Sonia’s birth in , her father descended into alcoholism, her parents’ marriage fell apart, and her father died when she was nine. Her mother brought up Sonia and her younger brother Junior as a single mother while the sparkling center of the family, her father’s mother, her beloved Abuelita, faded into a permanent state of grief. And when Sonia was seven she got Juvenile diabetes (Type 1) and was forced to take full responsibility for her own care because no adult in the family would, or could. These ingredients for disaster are laid out simply and clearly, and although you can feel her angers and hurts, you keep waiting for the axe to fall, for Sonia to say, “Poor me. My Beloved World
Born in the South Bronx, Sotomayor opens by tackling two major struggles she faced as a young girl, a diagnosis of Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes and a less that calm home life. Her close-knit family showered her with love, even when money was scarce, but an alcoholic father added strain to an already troublesome home. Her Catholic school upbringing brought the fear of God and the nuns into the early narrative, peppered with Sotomayor's passion to learn, an obvious escape from the fighting at home. It was only when she reached high school that Sotomayor found her niche through a teacher that took an academic interest in her. This scholastic passion grew as Sotomayor gained admission into Princeton and eventually Yale Law School, where she continued to excel. These were the early s and affirmative action was being bandied around Admission Offices across universities. Sotomayor addresses this, but makes a strong argument that her grades propelled her, even if certain doors may have been The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor