First: Sandra Day O’Connor

You know when there is no Book Corner for a while, I’m reading something heavy.  Either that, or sampling around and unable to settle on anything.  This time it was was something relatively heavy.

I’m afraid the first half of her life dragged for me – too much detail. And Thomas seems to emphasize especially in the first half her conservative, “Junior League,” “family-first” demeanor; when I looked up an interview with her on You Tube to remind myself how she really looked and talked, her directness and sharpness came as a stark contrast to the Sandra he had depicted for me.

The book picked up and things started swinging when she joined the Supremes. The copious detail was now welcome rather than tedious.

I already knew the sad ending to her story, having read Jeffrey Toobin’s THE NINE years ago, but it was even more heart-wrenching to read here. In short, O’Connor left the court while still in her prime, with her husband succumbing to Alzheimer’s, for both love of and duty towards him. Within months, he sunk lower than what she could deal with alone. She had to put him in a home. Top it off, her longtime friend (and sometime college boyfriend!), Chief Justice William Rehnquist, passed away around the same time.

While she would never again be as powerful a figure, in such a challenging and rewarding and influential a role, as she was as an active SCOTUS Justice, O’Connor succeeded for a while in finding true fulfilment spearheading efforts to teach civics to middle school children. You can still see the fruits of her labor online at http://www.icivics.org Today, Justice O’Connor is still with us, 90 years old as of this writing (born 1930), but suffering dementia herself.

Sad all around. But admire her for her never-ending drive and her pragmatic jurisprudence. In stark contrast to Justices Scalia and Alito, who believed that law should be treated like a catechism, O’Connor seemed to realize that we are all “just muddling along,” in the words of one of her clerks quoted here. “It was, wait a minute, we’re not doing this as an intellectual exercise. We’re doing this to run society. It’s just us people running things.”

Try to take heart that we had people like Sandra Day O’Connor “running things” for a while, and could one day again. (  )

This Is Big by Marisa Meltzer

Chapters that offer the biography of WW founder Jean Nidetch alternate with the author’s own “My Year of Doing WW” and meditations on being fat and diet culture in general.

Nidetch was a self-described “Former Fat Housewife” from Queens who founded Weight Watchers International in the early 1960s. Meltzer doesn’t have an awful lot of material to work with, but makes the best of what she has; after Nidetch stepped down from the presidency after a decade or two, the second half of her life seemed kind of sad coda. She divorced, gambled, lost a 49-year-old son (tumor? addiction? the jury seems to be out). She never gained back the fat; yet here’s proof that thin is not sufficient to make for a happy life.

Meltzer’s own life musings are a cut above those found in many other of the “My Year of” genre. I love the scathing attacks on ‘wellness’ culture – dieting by another name; “such a performance of loving yourself, of health, of fun, of flattering angles and good light and tight cropping.” “Wellness has become an excuse for doing what was once considered superficial; under the banner of wellness, the same activities are important, necessary, maybe transformative.”

Reminds me of points made in Smash the Wellness Industry, a NYT editorial I clipped and still keep smushed in a journal.  My favorite line being, “Nobody is telling men they need to love their bodies to live full and meaningful lines.” It was really a “I could have had a V-8” head-knocking moment for me to read that.

My own wellness goals entail being so busy pursuing my fulfilling life that I honestly no longer notice my tummy or butt size. Note this is still in the ‘goal’ stage. (  )