“With Ruth, I always thought that there would be a next time. For more than twenty years, she had defied not one but three bouts of cancer, not to mention other medical complications. Her endurance, her will to live even her plain old-fashioned grit, were unmatched. After one surgery, when most of us would be pushing the nursing station call button, she drafted a major speech. She even participated in Supreme Court oral arguments from her hospital bed.”
That’s the opening passage from NPR’s Nina Totenberg’s memoir: Dinners with Ruth: a Memoir on the Power of Friendships. Nina was friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg for almost 50 years.
We know that Nina reports on the doings of the Supreme Court, but who would have guessed that over the years she would entertain several of the Justices in her home and that Ruth would become one of her closest friends.
This book gives us a little peek into the workings of the Supreme Court, but it is mostly about the power of friendships that is so important to everyone, even, or maybe especially to the most powerful. Nina was fortunate to have a circle of close friends who were there for her through illnesses and the death of her first husband. That circle included NPR colleagues Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer. They would have dinner parties together, go to the cinema and show up for each other whenever needed.
Nina first met Ruth when she interviewed her about a legal brief she wrote asking the Supreme Court to declare a law that discriminated “on the basis of sex” to be unconstitutional. By the end of the book, you are amazed at how this little slip of a woman soldiered on to the very end.
If you’re looking for a peek into the lives of Nina Totenberg and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then you must read Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg.
