« Dinners with Ruth

Nina Totenberg encapsulated the life of the legendary Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) extremely well in ‘Dinners with Ruth’, including her journey in becoming a supreme court icon.

I gave a close friend this book as a gift before I had the chance to read it myself, so I set myself the goal to atleast finish it before they did, and I’m glad I did. The book so naturally surmised life’s ups and downs, but with the totem of the importance of friendship, and the people you keep around. This book, as well as ‘A promised land’ by Barack Obama have genuinely opened my eyes to the genre of Memoirs and Biographies, and their very captivating nature given the retelling of real events.

Having known about the US supreme court as a beacon of justice that it was, and has currently faltered from, the book also provided an inside eye into the workings of the court, all the way upto the recent Dobbs ruling leak. It offered me fresh insight on the nature of friendships inside the highest court, even when opinions on both sides of the bench were starkly opposite. Scalia’s friendship w/ RBG was probably one of the biggest surprises to me, given how idealogical different their opinions were. Nina’s journalistic perspective, and the capacity to share the facts without the personal bias made it apparent to me that journalism is hard work. Especially in the era of fake news, AI generated spam articles covered with about a dozen popups, and social media being the main source of most people’s news consumptions, its hard to not feel longing for a more simpler past where integrity and facts were held above all. Nina covers RBGs hold-out from resigining while Obama was still president, in the hopes that she would be able to empower then Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton to be the first woman to be able to appoint a Supreme court justice, but all those hopes being squandered away until her eventual demise.

Would recommend the book to folks who have a decent interest in the workings of the highest court, and are interested in the persepective of friendships at the higest level.