The Majority
A Novel
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Inspired by history, a riveting novel of love and friendship, motherhood and ambition, and one woman’s fight to be a Supreme Court justice.
Half of the United States is waiting for Justice Sylvia Olin Bernstein to die. The other half is praying for her to hold on. At 83, “the contemptuous S.O.B.” doesn’t have much time left. What she has is a story, one she has wrested from the grip of history to tell herself—of how she rose to her historic position on the Supreme Court, and the barriers she broke along the way.
Told over fifty years, from losing her mother at a young age, to falling in love, to navigating an unplanned pregnancy and motherhood, to learning how to spar with a sexist mentor, Sylvia’s personal story reveals the intimate truth about who she was as she ascended to her modern throne: not just a brilliant mind, but a daughter, a best friend, a wife, mother, and advocate. While caught in a dramatic tug of war between career and family, truth and convenience, progress and patience, she will be given a chance to change the course of American history – and give voice, at last, to the majority.
Set against the vibrant sweep of the 20th century, THE MAJORITY brings us into the sacrifices, heartaches, and complex emotional life of a powerful woman ahead of her time, whose life and work turn out to have supreme stakes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Silver (The Tincture of Time) draws on the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her incisive latest. Raised in Brooklyn in the 1940s, Sylvia Olin Bernstein grows up to become a vocal advocate for gender equality and a Supreme Court justice known as "the contemptuous S.O.B." Silver frames the narrative as a memoir by the elderly Sylvia in which she recounts her childhood, college years, early career as a lawyer, and experiences as a young wife and mother. Though the reader gets to know Sylvia as a litigator, Silver keeps the focus on her personal life, and particularly on the women in it: the mother who dies when Sylvia is a teenager, the Holocaust survivor cousin who helps to raise her, the law school roommate who experiences sexual harassment, and the daughter with whom Sylvia has a fraught relationship. The parallels to Ginsburg are obvious, but Silver wisely gives Sylvia her own path to travel, emphasizing how her professional goals both shape and are shaped by her experiences as a woman. Ginsburg's many admirers will be captivated by her literary counterpart.
