Reading this book was a bit like saving up to go to a really nice restaurant only to have the the food be overpriced and underwhelming. The book uses the relationship between Totenberg and Ginsburg as the hook to get you to buy/read the book. The book is really the autobiography of Nina Totenberg, but her approach is to weave her career and personal life together with Ginsburg’s. The technique doesn’t work. Totenberg is too deferential to Ginsburg to say anything other than Ruth was a thoughtful and kind friend. Her dinners with Ruth offer no insight into the justice that you haven’t read in a New York Times profile. At the same time it makes Totenberg’s story less interesting, because she treats the challenges that she faced in her career superficially as well. All of the original women at NPR come off as feminist heroines without significant details. Male colleagues are barely mentioned. Significant struggles for stories, credibility, salaries, recognition are missing.
Part of the problem with this book may also be it’s timing. As NPR’s legal affairs correspondent for decades, Totenberg has had access to the court and has protected that access by upholding the institution. That deference to the institution has been a failure in reporting. As the past few years have shown, the far more interesting and critical issues about the court are the politicization of the court, it’s overreach and lack of ethical accountability. Friendships clearly have helped Totenberg in her life, but they aren’t the most interesting reading.
