Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice
Author: Joan Biskupic
Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, was called the most powerful woman in America. She became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Drawing on information gleaned from once-private papers, hundreds of interviews, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, author Joan Biskupic offers readers a fascinating portrait of a complex and multifaceted woman—lawyer, politician, legislator, and justice, as well as wife, mother, A-list society hostess, and competitive athlete. Biskupic provides an in-depth account of her transformation from tentative jurist to confident architect of American law.
The Washington Post - Kathleen M. Sullivan
Biskupic gives a fascinating account of O'Connor's political astuteness; she was appointed and reelected as an Arizona state senator, then rose to become majority leader of that body. Later, she became a judge on an Arizona trial court and an intermediate appeals court. Diligent, alert, energetic and adept at politicking, she was a master of the telephone call and the handwritten note, and she helped organize everything from Republican presidential campaigns in Arizona to her classmate Rehnquist's confirmation to the Supreme Court.
The New York Times - Emily Bazelon
…if Biskupic lacks intimate confidences for Sandra Day O'Connor, she has something else: perfect timing. Her book appears as O'Connor leaves the bench and while her legacy is unsettled. Biskupic jumps into that opening with a well-researched and (no doubt to O'Connor's chagrin) revealing account.
Publishers Weekly
In the late 1980s, as the Supreme Court justices were discussing a case, Antonin Scalia ranted against affirmative action. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first and then still the only woman on the High Court, replied, "Why, Nino, how do you think I got my job?" This is one of the few revelatory moments in Biskupic's bio of the retiring O'Connor as sharp-tongued, humorous and utterly realistic. It's also, as Biskupic shows in a close study of O'Connor's jurisprudence, a bit misleading: for most of her career on the Court, the conservative O'Connor voted against affirmative action. With access to justices' once private papers, longtime court observer Biskupic, now with USA Today, sheds light on the internal workings on the Court, but not much on the internal workings of the very private O'Connor's mind and heart. Biskupic does show the justice gaining confidence and force on the Court, particularly after her fight against breast cancer in 1988. As O'Connor faces retirement, Biskupic clarifies her judicial legacy, sometimes seeing the glass as half full, sometimes as half empty: praising her lack of ideology but also noting a lack of vision in a justice who often "step[s] to the brink, and then back[s] away"-a mixed legacy that will be debated for years to come. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Veteran Supreme Court reporter Biskupic offers an insightful biography of perhaps the most influential associate justice in recent history. She cites O'Connor's frontierlike upbringing in Arizona and her ability to mingle with finesse in a male world as factors in her ascension to the de facto leadership of the Court's centrist plurality, which has swayed the majority opinion on a range of issues, including abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and the death penalty. Biskupic underscores the nontraditional nature of O'Connor's credentials: her lack of high-level judicial experience and her brief career in the Arizona State Senate. But there were also her connections with the Republican Party and her inclination to avoid public positions on controversial topics. O'Connor was a consensus-builder and team player, but Biskupic nevertheless traces the theme of women's rights in her career-as when she exhorted President Nixon to name a woman to the Supreme Court. Once on the Court, she was frequently called on to write opinions involving sex discrimination and women's rights. On abortion, she carefully backtracked, allowing states more latitude than the approach taken by the liberals but rebuffing conservative efforts to gut abortion rights altogether. The O'Connor Court, Biskupic notes, thus moved the law-and society-in new directions. Highly recommended.-Philip Y. Blue, New York State Supreme Court Criminal Branch Law Lib., New York Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
"She was not raised to sit still," remarked a weary clerk of Sandra Day O'Connor. Indeed not, as this lively life of the just-retired Associate Justice relates. Supreme Court chronicler Biskupic writes, mostly admiringly but not unreservedly, of O'Connor, a tough but polite woman who grew up on an Arizona ranch headed by a never-pleased patriarch who, by most accounts, put the fear into everyone he met. Sandy Day was brilliant, a surprise to her classmates at Stanford Law School (including William Rehnquist, whom she briefly dated) and to hapless chauvinists in the Phoenix suburbs, to which she and her husband repaired in 1957. O'Connor served as a state legislator-a fellow senator, meaning to be complimentary, said of her, "this pretty little thing carries a disconcerting load of expertise"-and appeals-court judge before being shortlisted by Attorney General William French Smith to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1981. Though President Reagan had pledged to name a woman to the court, Biskupic writes, "O'Connor's credentials did not make her an obvious candidate." On closer examination, administration vetters found that she was politically well-connected and suitably conservative, though big-C rightists had fits when they discovered that O'Connor was generally pro-choice. No matter: she easily passed the audition, only to take a mostly independent course on the bench that put her at odds with doctrinaire types on the left and right alike. Biskupic does a solid job of charting O'Connor's evolution as a judge who, given her druthers, preferred to seek consensus and split the difference in a given dispute over the slash-and-burn approach of certain other jurists,notably bete noire Antonin Scalia. O'Connor shaped the law, Biskupic concludes, "with her Western pragmatism, her feel for the American center-and a shrewd but quiet negotiating skill."Fitting farewell to an influential jurist who may soon be very much missed.
Interesting book: Vegetarian Express or Painters Kitchen
God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush
Author: Randall Balmer
How did we go from John F. Kennedy declaring that religion should play no role in the elections to Bush saying, "I believe that God wants me to be president"?
Historian Randall Balmer takes us on a tour of presidential religiosity in the last half of the twentieth century—from Kennedy's 1960 speech that proposed an almost absolute wall between American political and religious life to the soft religiosity of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; from Richard Nixon's manipulation of religion to fit his own needs to Gerald Ford's quiet stoicism; from Jimmy Carter's introduction of evangelicalism into the mainstream to Ronald Reagan's co-option of the same group; from Bill Clinton's covert way of turning religion into a non-issue to George W. Bush's overt Christian messages, Balmer reveals the role religion has played in the personal and political lives of these American presidents.
Americans were once content to disregard religion as a criterion for voting, as in most of the modern presidential elections before Jimmy Carter.But today's voters have come to expect candidates to fully disclose their religious views and to deeply illustrate their personal relationship to the Almighty. God in the White House explores the paradox of Americans' expectation that presidents should simultaneously trumpet their religious views and relationship to God while supporting the separation of church and state. Balmer tells the story of the politicization of religion in the last half of the twentieth century, as well as the "religionization" of our politics. He reflects on the implications of this shift, which have reverberated in both our religious and political worlds, and offers a new lens through which to see not only these extraordinary individuals, but also our current political situation.
Publishers Weekly
How did personal faith go from something John F. Kennedy needed to distance himself from to something recent presidential candidates have been eager to embrace publicly? Balmer, an eminent historian and first-rate storyteller, recounts familiar material in a way that's fresh. He wisely suggests that genuine blame for misuse of religion in public rests with voters, not politicians. But a running quarrel with the "religious right"-unannounced in the title-seems the real raison d'être for this book, and many arguments and examples will be familiar to readers of the author's Thy Kingdom Come. Balmer marshals impressive evidence that the religious right arose in reaction to government interference with racist religious schools. But he often tends to overstate and sometimes omits key facts. Balmer traces the right's slow response to 1973's Roev. Wadedecision by quoting the Southern Baptist Convention's initial support of Roe, without noting that the takeover of that church by fundamentalists came later and largely over that issue. Most oddly, Balmer describes the war in Iraq as America's first aggressive military campaign "in history." These eccentricities make the book feel agenda-driven, and render questionable even its many points of wisdom. (Mar.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
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