RaveThe Washington Post... meaty, often scintillating and sometimes scary ... It’s a dazzling feat, especially considering the quick turnaround time for publication. Granted, readers outside the rarefied world of appellate litigation may find some passages a steep climb. That’s not a criticism; digging into the judicial and legislative history that has brought us to where we are today on essential issues like voting rights is a key component of \'the work\' that thoughtful activists have been correctly warning we need to do. With the stakes for individual constitutional rights and even American democracy as high as they are right now, it behooves us to follow the details wherein the proverbial devil lies, and Greenhouse has the skill to help readers do exactly that.
Jeffrey Rosen
RaveThe Washington Post... will surely entice the many who can’t get enough of our country’s most meme-able jurist ... readers who come for RBG’s Greatest Hits will end up getting something richer: At its best, Conversations makes you feel like a student in the world’s coolest law school seminar, with Ginsburg and Rosen deftly leading you through constitutional clauses and case law to elucidate how the court works and why it matters ... Rosen’s familiarity with his leading lady pays off. The two have an easy repartee ... ome of the biographical anecdotes here are well-known to RBG obsessives ... More satisfying are Rosen and Ginsburg’s dives into the substance of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Rosen, a professor at George Washington University Law School and the president of the National Constitution Center, is as skilled as Ginsburg at laying out legal concepts for nonexpert readers without dumbing them down so far that an appellate litigator would scoff ... for the legally minded progressives who’ve already added it to their holiday wish lists, Conversations is anything but a downer. Ginsburg, 86, speaks of her cancer battles this year with inspiring toughness ... For those who don’t have Rosen’s good fortune to join her at an opera, the vision of an energized RBG zipping around the country right up to the next presidential election makes for a pretty nice liberal dream sequence, too.
Evan Thomas
RaveThe Washington Post\"...illuminating and eminently readable ... Thomas vividly sketches the attributes [O\'Connor] used to clear the high barriers to female ascendancy ... In Thomas’s more generous interpretation, O’Connor’s judicial \'minimalism\' flowed naturally from a realpolitik she’d honed as, well, a real politician ... The scenes of O’Connor retiring early to help care for husband as he struggles with Alzheimer’s are poignant; the news of her own diagnosis with that same brutal disease even more so ... Thomas gives O’Connor the credit she deserves.\
Evan Thomas
PositiveThe Philadelphia InquirerA major biography like First by Evan Thomas draws its power not only from the people and events it depicts but also from the culture into which it’s launched. The white-hot polarization in the age of Trump makes Sandra Day O’Connor’s preference for cool civility and compromise seem especially appealing ... Thomas vividly sketches the attributes [O\'Connor] used to clear the high barriers to female ascendancy: a knack for brushing past insults, relentlessness belied by a pretty smile, an almost superhuman level of energy, and, not least, a heroically supportive husband ... does give us a real sense of Sandra Day O’Connor the human being ... Thomas gives O’Connor the credit she deserves.
