My Beloved World

My Beloved World
by
Sonja Sotomayor
read by
Rita Moreno

What an interesting and engaging story. Right from the get-go, I was hooked. The forward and prologue were read by Sotomayor herself and while Moreno does a great job, I really wish that Sotomayor had read the whole book. You can tell that she is a practiced speaker and the emotion with which she read was deep. I suppose her life as a Supreme Court Justice kind of doesn't allow much time for these kinds of things.
The start of Sotomayor's tale is about coming to grips with her childhood diabetes and of the death of her father at a young age. It is evident from the very beginning that she has always been self-confident no mattter what she says, not to mention that her idea of what a normal person is, better describes the academic and legal elite.
Sotomayor was born in New York and did not visit her parent's native Puerto Rico until she was old enough to be aware of it and what it meant. This is the place where she learned to love ripe mangoes, and would become aware of social classes.
During high school, Sotomayor joined her high school's debate and forensics team and explains how she felt while winning her first tournament competing in Extemporaneous speaking. It was cool to hear that what she was doing before I was even born had not changed at all by the time I was in high school and college competing in debate and forensics. But while I had some idea of what it was like to win a tournament, I never experienced it the way that she did. I never had that moment of clarity where I knew how to make every single member of the audience pick me to win. Even when winning, I never felt that I deserved to win because I was the best speaker or debater. At best I might have known that at that moment I had eeked something out.
After high school, Sotomayor went to Princeton. She pretty much took the place by storm as one would expect. She stayed away from the activist scene until she found a way to do it constructively and was involved with getting the university to hire Hispanic faculty. She also would have us believe that she graduated summa cum laude without knowing what the term meant before she was told she was graduating with the honors, I am a bit incredulous, not at her graduating with such high honors, but that having gone to a Catholic High School that she was never exposed to any Latin or to that term before.
The college years were busy for Sotomayor. As well as being a top student at Princeton and Yale Law School, her dear grandmother died. She also went to visit Puerto Rico, for the first time seeing it as an adult and seeing that it was not the paradise she had always thought it was which leads her into learning about it's history and working on rights for Puerto Ricans. She also marries her honey, Kevin and becomes editor of the Yale Law Review.
After law school, Sotomayor becomes an assistant DA in New York and becomes married to the job. She spends so much time on her, six days a week twelve to fifteen hours a day, that she and her actual husband grow apart and eventually divorce. By all accounts is was an amicable break-up, though Sotomayor is wise enough that if it were not, she would never let on. It is after telling of the dissolution of her marriage that she talks at great length of families and how we may not always be born into a family that best suits us, we can create our own families with the people we work with and associate with in our free time and it is these families that we make that one can find as much satisfaction and love as with the ones we are born into.
Sotomayor spends so much time saying how she will not discuss the details of any case she worked on because there are those that will try and interpret her actions in such a way as to predict how she will react as a Supreme Court Justice, that is a bit of a surprise when she talks about being asked to help try the Tarzan killer and explains how he could be tried for multiple crimes and why she and the more senior member of the DA's office had to be very careful and yet go for as big of a case as they could possibly get. I'm glad she included this, as I find her explanation of the workings of the DA's office very easy to understand and I also recognize how significant it is to successfully prosecute a serial killer.
Sotomayor covers the time up until she becomes a judge. If you want to know her brilliant insights into jurisprudence, you are going to need to read her rulings, because she wasn't kidding about not sharing them here.
This is a very well told story, read by a great reader. I did get a little perturbed about the hundredth time that she said she was just a normal person from a normal family. Well, the latter may be true, though I can't speak from experience about normal families. She spends the whole book telling one great anecdote after another, usually involving her setting herself heads and shoulders above her peers and we're expected to believe it ain't no thang? Well, I bet it isn't, I bet it really is as easy as she makes it sound - for her. Normal people are not brilliant legal scholars or the top jurists in the country. Normal people do not graduate Summa Cum Laude from Princeton or edit the Yale Law Review. If it were normal, why aren't there more peole like her running this country? Or pumping gas at the filling station? Or ringing up groceries at the local store? I don't think it's false modesty on Sotomayor's fault, I think she genuinely believes anyone can do what she did if they work hard enough and perservere. Is it odd that someone so intelligent and seemingly wise can also be so naive in this area?

My Beloved World at Amazon.com
My Beloved World Audiobook at Amazon.com