Dinners with Ruth

By Nina Totenberg

Simon & Schuster     2022

304 pages     Memoir

Every American woman knows who Ruth Bader Ginsburg was. Her legacy continues to evolve as a beacon of light for women’s rights in this confused country. And if you listen to National Public Radio, you know who Nina Totenberg is. She has been NPR’s legal affairs correspondent for many years, and she covered the Supreme Court during the years that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a justice and only the second female justice on the Court.

In this memoir, Totenberg tells her own life story interspersed with stories of her friendship with Ginsburg. It becomes an ode to the power of women and of the hard-fought battle to overcome the stigma of women’s second-class status in society. Her friendship with Ginsburg began when she interviewed her in 1971 and continued through interviews, dinner parties, phone calls, and medical emergencies.

More importantly, it is the story of friendship and of women helping women succeed. Not only Totenberg’s friendship with Ginsburg, but also her friendship/working relationship with Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts at NPR. Through story after story, we learn of these women’s growth as well as the progress of women in the media and in the public arena.

We all wondered why Ginsburg, who knew she was suffering from fatal cancer, did not retire from the Supreme Court. Totenberg offers her own justification. She says, “It was a gamble and she lost.” Ginsburg had wanted the first woman President  to choose her successor. Of course, this didn’t happen, and then Ginsburg wanted to survive through the Trump administration. And on a political note, it has been all downhill since then.

One story I found particularly fascinating is extraneous to the story of Ginsburg. Totenberg tells of her father, Roman Totenberg, who was a world-famous violinist. His Stradivarius violin had been stolen by a former student in 1980. In 2015, the FBI informed the Totenberg family that the violin had been discovered in a closet when the man died. It is a remarkable story and should, of course, be present in Totenberg’s memoir, even though it has little to do with Ginsburg.

Many of my major opinions regarding Dinners with Ruth has to do with the power of friendship. I very much connected with that particular story line because of how deeply my friends have rallied to help me following the death of my husband. My book club is discussing Dinners with Ruth tonight and I will want them to know how dear they all are to me. Reading the book has also caused me to do a lot of thinking about my role in sustaining friendships.

Some reviewers complained that the memoir leans too much on Totenberg’s rather than Ginsburg’s life story. But I don’t think that was Totenberg’s purpose. I found the book to be an intimate look at how friendships grow from work relationships, and that with some effort on the part of all parties involved, friendships can survive and thrive.

Here is the story of Nina Totenberg’s father’s Stradivarius.