First
Sandra Day O'Connor
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, America’s first female Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time access to Justice O’Connor’s archives—as seen on PBS’s American Experience
“She’s a hero for our time, and this is the biography for our time.”—Walter Isaacson
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post
She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings—doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness.
She became the first ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the United States Supreme Court, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the Court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise.
Women and men who want to be leaders and be first in their own lives—who want to learn when to walk away and when to stand their ground—will be inspired by O’Connor’s example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family, who believed in serving her country, and who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for all women.
Praise for First
“Cinematic . . . poignant . . . illuminating and eminently readable . . . First gives us a real sense of Sandra Day O’Connor the human being. . . . Thomas gives O’Connor the credit she deserves.”—The Washington Post
“[A] fascinating and revelatory biography . . . a richly detailed picture of [O’Connor’s] personal and professional life . . . Evan Thomas’s book is not just a biography of a remarkable woman, but an elegy for a worldview that, in law as well as politics, has disappeared from the nation’s main stages.”—The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Thomas (Being Nixon) offers a well-sourced and sympathetic biography of Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and frequently the tie-breaking vote in pivotal decisions on divisive social issues. Utilizing Supreme Court internal records and interviews with his subject and many of her clerks, friends, and family, Thomas draws a three-dimensional portrait of O'Connor that reflects the importance of her personal relationships, as well as the judicial philosophy she employed to craft her opinions on such issues as a woman's right to choose, affirmative action, and the separation of church and state. Thomas identifies O'Connor's genius in her pragmatism, her ability to look beyond abstract legal concepts and instead focus on how the outcome of a particular ruling would affect the litigants and the public at large. Readers will appreciate the gossipy intrigues of the Supreme Court, including the mutual dislike between O'Connor and Antonin Scalia that was kept under a lid at work, but became obvious during a doubles tennis match. In 2006, O'Connor resigned from the Court to care for her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer's, and the years after her resignation are poignantly and affectingly described. This insightful account is worthy of its subject.
