Audio Book Review: My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

As I mentioned in my last audio book review, I've lucked my way onto a special list from Random House Audio, and I have to say that listening to Sonia Sotomayor's My Beloved World was as pleasant a surprise as I've ever had in my audio book experience.  I never would have picked this book up to read, much less purchased the audio book for myself, which in retrospect makes me something of a fool.

This book was everything that I had hoped Maya Angelou's memoir would be and wasn't: immediately engaging, beautifully read, and exceptionally written. If I had been reading this book instead of listening to it, there would have been much underlining and dog-earing of pages to mark the lovely passages.Rita Moreno performs the audio and she is definitely one of the better readers I've ever listened to.  The prologue is read by Sotomayor herself, and while it's nice to hear her actual voice, Moreno was definitely the perfect choice for reading the rest of the book.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a Supreme Court justice can write well, but I was.  Good writing isn't usually a hallmark of memoirs with a political bent, and so many lawyers I know run on at the mouth without actually saying much, that it was actually a double surprise. I particularly enjoyed learning about her younger years up through her time at Princeton and the various struggles she faced along the way. There was the rare occasion when I felt that Sotomayor, in summing up the end of a couple of chapters, was a tad too didactic, but overall this was just terrific.  Underdog stories are good, and hers is certainly one of the great underdog stories of our time. I highly recommend it to anybody interested in memoir, strong women, feisty characters, the immigrant experience, minority rights, or simply a damn good story.