Longtime NPR correspondent Totenberg recounts her friendship with the late Supreme Court justice.Many readers may not know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) studied literature with the noted (and notorious) Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell, "where she truly came alive." What Totenberg and Ginsburg shared over a half-century friendship, much spent over bowls of bouillabaisse, was a profound love of conversation and learning, to say nothing of the law, to which Totenberg had a sort of trial by fire, covering, among many other events, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. "For understandable reasons," she writes, "he's never granted me an interview, and when we attend the same social events, I keep my distance." Ginsburg was a devoted student and thoughtful interpreter of the law, which made her invaluable as a member of the court. As the author writes, she also had a gift for being "able to separate fierce intellectual disagreements from personal animus," which helps explain why the aforementioned Thomas, with whom she often disagreed, paid deeply felt tribute to her after her death. Indeed, counseled Ginsburg, "It helps, sometimes, to be a little deaf when unkind or thoughtless words are spoken." She has been honored and eulogized countless times since her death in 2020, but, Totenberg reminds us, while Ginsburg sought points of common ground in developing arguments and dissents, she was still the victim of partisan politics. In a typically nasty move, Mitch McConnell denied her a place lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, which the Senate controls, and she was honored in Statuary Hall, the purview of the House. McConnell did not attend. "Even as many conservatives will welcome a far more conservative, some might say extreme, Court," Totenberg closes, meaningfully, "many in America may well be surprised to miss a more centrist Court, as they will miss RGB."An affectionate, revealing portrait of an important figure in American history.

In this luminous debut, NPR legal correspondent Totenberg delivers a riveting account of her 50-year friendship with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The daughter of Polish violin virtuoso Roman Totenberg, the author was raised in the 1940s and ’50s in a bustling home filled with music and culture. After giving Boston University a college try, Totenberg dropped out to become a journalist. Parallel to her story runs an equally enthralling look at Ginsburg’s life, from her modest childhood in the 1930s as the daughter of immigrant factory workers to studying law at Harvard. Their lives collided in 1971 when Ginsburg, arguing a sex discrimination case before the Supreme Court, received a phone call from Totenberg, who was covering the story for the National Observer. While their friendship saw plenty of historic highs, including Totenberg’s groundbreaking legal work at NPR and Ginsburg’s confirmation as a SCOTUS justice in 1993, Totenberg writes, “The irony is that while work... defined each of us... our friendship was never about work.” Indeed, it’s Totenberg’s writing about the personal hardships they overcame together—including the death of Totenberg’s first husband, Sen. Floyd Haskell, and Ginsburg’s bouts with colon, pancreatic, and lung cancer—that imbues her narrative with emotional depth, making this portrait of friendship all the more captivating. Readers are sure to be charmed. (Sept.)