Hello CWBA members!  I am honored to lead the CWBA Book Club. My goal is to select books that challenge our thinking and aid in our shared desire to grow as humans and attorneys.  Our book selections written by female authors will be posted here. 

To facilitate our discussion, I may post questions about the selection and supplemental reference materials in the Book Club Group on this blog. Another way to engage will be during our quarterly Zoom meeting hosted by the CWBA.  If you are uncomfortable participating online, feel free to reach out to me offline to chat more about the selection.  I hope you find value in the book club, and I look forward to your feedback. 

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Best,
Bethany R. Reece

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “searching and emotionally intimate memoir” (The New York Times) told with a candor never before undertaken by a sitting Justice. This “powerful defense of empathy” (The Washington Post) is destined to become a classic of self-invention and self-discovery.

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Publisher's Description:

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, in this story of human triumph that “hums with hope and exhilaration” (NPR), she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testimony to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself. 
 

Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father (who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately depend on herself. She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she needed to survive and soon imagined a path to a different life.
 

With only television characters for her professional role models, and little understanding of what was involved, she determined to become a lawyer, a dream that would sustain her on an unlikely course, from valedictorian of her high school class to the highest honors at Princeton, Yale Law School, the New York County District Attorney’s office, private practice, and appointment to the Federal District Court before the age of forty.
 

Along the way we see how she was shaped by her invaluable mentors, a failed marriage, and the modern version of extended family she has created from cherished friends and their children. Through her still-astonished eyes, America’s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this warm and honest book.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself.” (NPR)

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Publisher's Description: "In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

 

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was 25 years old, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

 

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread."

Winner, Colorado Book Award & Reading the West Award. A Best Book of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews & American Library Association. Best Book about Justice by The Atlantic. Finalist, Barnes & Noble Discover Award & Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.
 

Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated “the most contaminated site in America.” It’s the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and, unknown to those who lived there, tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
 

It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets, both family and government. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.
 

But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She learned about the infamous 1969 “Mother’s Day Fire,” in which a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited, and—despite the desperate efforts of firefighters—came perilously close to a “criticality,” the deadly blue flash that signals a nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that would have had devastating consequences for the entire Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which accidents were always called “incidents.”
 

As this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a detailed and shocking account of the government’s sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents’ vain attempts to seek justice in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky Flats workers—from the healthy, who regard their work at the plant with pride and patriotism, to the ill or dying, who battle for compensation for cancers they got on the job. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life.