NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The intimate, inspiring, and
authoritative biography of Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first female
Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time
access to Justice O'Connor's archives--as seen on PBS's American
Experience*
*
"She's a hero for our time, and this is the biography for our
time."--Walter Isaacson
**Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Named One of the
Best Books of the Year by NPR and *The Washington Post
She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in
Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set
her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of
her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But
Sandra Day O'Connor's story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered
glass ceilings--doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor,
understatement, and cowgirl toughness.
She became the first ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a
judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers
and humanized the law. When she arrived at the United States Supreme
Court, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she began a
quarter-century tenure on the Court, hearing cases that ultimately
shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring
for a husband with Alzheimer's, O'Connor endured every difficulty with
grit and poise.
Women and men who want to be leaders and be first in their own
lives--who want to learn when to walk away and when to stand their
ground--will be inspired by O'Connor's example. This is a remarkably
vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family, who
believed in serving her country, and who, when she became the most
powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for all women.
Praise for First
"Cinematic . . . poignant . . . illuminating and eminently readable . .
. First gives us a real sense of Sandra Day O'Connor the human being.
. . . Thomas gives O'Connor the credit she deserves."--The Washington
Post
"[A] fascinating and revelatory biography . . . a richly detailed
picture of [O'Connor's] personal and professional life . . . Evan
Thomas's book is not just a biography of a remarkable woman, but an
elegy for a worldview that, in law as well as politics, has disappeared
from the nation's main stages."--The New York Times Book Review
