The Nine

This a fantastic inside look at the personalities and ideologies at work on the supreme court. A must read any politics junkie!

I guess I was in the mood to read about the inner workings of our government. I couldn't put this book down. The Nine is the story of the Supreme Court justices who have served on the court in the last twenty years. The brightest minds and most thoughtful judges in the country are not always chosen. Instead, wisdom is sacrified for political opinion.



I was most aghast at Clarence Thomas. He rarely speaks and often votes alone, as he tends to hold opinions held by almost no one else. Not only that, but he repudiates the very system, racial quotas, that got him where he is today.



I was most taken with the story of Sandra Day O'Connor who went from being a nobody judge with strikingly conservative opinions to a moderate who listened to the voice of the American people when trying to make a decision.



One of my favorite reads of the year.

Insightful, eye-opening, revealing, fascinating. I gained newfound respect for some then-contemporary justices, in particular Sandra Day O'Connor, although at the end, the discussion of the Gore - Bush election decision was nearly shocking and very disappointing, as unworthy of an otherwise pretty laudable institution, in which most of the justices grow into something more than they started. Hopefully this will continue. I understood that the book is very much through Toobin's eyes, but he is quite even-handed and his research seemed impeccable.