Becoming Justice Blackmun by Linda Greenhouse

Total Reading Time: 5.25 hours

Review: Taken from thousands of pages of Harry Blackmun’s personal and public documents and discerningly distilled down, Linda Greenhouse presents an intimate look inside a remarkable man. The book provided a new-found respect for the rigors and challenges of being a Supreme Court Justice. While reading opinions in law school, it is easy to find fault with particular outcomes or rationales and, yet, to get a glimpse into one man’s personal struggles with such complicated constitutional issues as privacy, capital punishment and gender discrimination provides a whole other dimension to legal scholarship.