PositiveMinneapolis Star Tribune\"Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life... offers a detailed account of Ginsburg’s childhood in Brooklyn, her close relationship with her mother, who died of cancer when Ruth was just beginning college at Cornell University, and the difficulties faced by a brilliant young woman in the halls of academe in the 1950s ... De Hart’s thorough biography relates this life story with a nice sense of the sweep of feminist and legal history that is contained within it ... For all this, there is less of a sense of [Ginsburg\'s] own thoughts and feelings than one could hope for. Personal expressions of the deep and animating factors that have guided her life are missing. Beyond her legal writings and opinions, the inner Ruth remains elusive.\
Paul Collins
PositiveThe Minneapolis Star Tribune\"Using a bountiful trove of resource material, including gavel-to-gavel coverage in the eight daily newspapers that existed in the Boston area at the time, as well as several different trial transcripts and the journal of trial observer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Collins offers a keen portrait of the social and cultural milieu in which this shocking murder and subsequent trial were played out ... Anyone curious about how well-mannered psychopathy was acted out among the greens of 19th-century Cambridge will be rewarded by reading Blood & Ivy.\
Candice Millard
RaveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneAside from a gift for spotting compelling and underreported narrative material in the lives of familiar historical figures, Millard is an extremely talented writer, equally adept at penning heart-stopping battlefield scenes and the peculiarities of the emerging Boer culture in early South African history. She has an eye for telling detail and character insight, a dual skill that makes Hero of the Empire a page turner and a fascinating portrait of one of the 20th century’s great figures.
