Notorious RBG: the Gift of Her Story with Thanks to Her, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Notorious RBG cover - book by Irin Carmon
Notorious RBG cover – book by Irin Carmon

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an enormously compelling figure.  How do I know this?  Authors Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik have given us the gift of this book, that’s how.  Described by the New York Times as “a cheery curio, as if a scrapbook and the Talmud decided to have a baby,” it is a lively, engrossing, humanizing introduction to a revered figure.

Born in 1933, six years before World War II, she remains, at 82, very much a part of our present, and our future.  Hers are the shoulders so many of us stand upon, proud of what we’ve fought for for today’s young women and men, parents and professionals, teachers, truckers and temps — all of it so much less than she faced down and conquered.  For all of us.

Beyond the exploration of her remarkable intellect and judicial virtuosity, Carmon reveals the warmth, spirit and personal moments that transform an icon into a person.  Her unlikely close friendship not only with Justice Scalia but also with his family, is intriguing, of course.  The genuine partnership she shared with her husband Mary for 56 years is a unifying thread through much of the book; the story of his last days one of the most moving.

Of course, threaded through the narrative are the legal and policy changes she championed and often brought from idea to reality — and, in recent years, fought, not always successfully, against the reversal of some of them.  From her days at Harvard Law School to those on the O’Connor Court, the impact of her passion and intellect is clear.

So.  If you want to have fun and be inspired at the same time, or need a gift for anyone who cares about women, or law and policy, or just loves a great story, this is it.  (Full disclosure: I DO know Irin but I never expected to write about the book until I read it.  Couldn’t help myself….)

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.