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72
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
64/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Nina Totenberg
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
September 13, 2022
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg examines her life, career, and female colleagues and relatives, focusing on her 50-year friendship with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
What The Reviewers Say
A memoir about Nina Totenberg, a jaunt through her captivating life and career, nose for the jugular, and forthrightness about her joys and sorrows. The book opens a window into the history of professional women in the workplace, as well as the trajectory of the Supreme Court over the last 50 years. Above all, Totenberg's book is about the abiding importance of friendship.
The book, a loosely organized account of her own life, and the role of Ginsburg (among other friends) in it, has a genial, likable tone. Totenberg’s stories are lively but never go on too long; she appears to reflexively turn the reader’s attention to the generosity or small kindnesses of others. She writes, without pretension or self-congratulation, about moments of journalistic triumph of which she has every right to be proud. She is also unfailingly discreet, a quality that the reader must concede reflects well on her as a friend. It serves her less well as the author of a memoir whose most central character, outside of Totenberg herself, is one of the most influential, fascinating and, to some, frustrating women of the last century.
Dinners With Ruth is really three excellent books: a memoir of Nina Totenberg's relatively blessed life; an anecdotal account of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's; and, finally, a paean to the bond of friendship, which, like fine wine, gets better with age. It is so engagingly written, so captivating, it's difficult not to feel at least a little jealous of Totenberg, who seems to have it all.
For anyone who has seen the heartwarming documentary RBG (and if you haven’t, you really need to), some of Totenberg’s anecdotes will be familiar, but that’s no surprise given their long-running friendship. Add to that, Totenberg was one of Ginsburg’s most frequent interviewers over the years as the tiny-but-fierce Supreme Court justice grew into her alter ego, that icon of girl power, the Notorious RBG.
