Totenberg pens ode to friendship
“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.
A legal affairs correspondent for NPR, she has lived a life largely blessed both by success and by friends with which to share the good — and, more importantly, bad — times.
Totenberg quit Boston University three years in and wrangled a job writing for the women’s page of the Record-American (later the Boston Herald). Other papers followed, including the National Observer, where she first started covering the Supreme Court.
Her first contact with Ginsburg was as a source, but they grew closer over the years. Totenberg shares fresh details about Ginsburg’s life, or at least details fresh to me: how husband Marty was instrumental in getting Ginsburg appointed as a federal judge, how she ignored then-President Barack Obama and refused to resign because she wanted a victorious Hillary Clinton to appoint the next justice; and how RBG became “a personal lifeline” when Totenberg was dealing with the serious illness of her first husband, former Sen. Floyd Haskell.
The book is filled with so much love it’s almost an antidote to the daily news section. Almost.
Totenberg revised her epilogue following the Roe v. Wade decision, wondering if “even some staunch conservatives may come to miss the more centrist Court ... that rocked the boat from time to time, but seemed to know it couldn’t
go far beyond public opinion.” — Curt Schleier, Minneapolis Star Tribune
U.S. Marines training for the invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa didn’t know they would face the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific theater of World War II. The nearly three-month battle in summer 1945 would cost the Marine Corps, the Army and the Navy nearly 13,000 dead and three times as many wounded.
And who were the Marines training? Author Buzz Bissinger, whose “Friday Nights Lights” explored lives shaped by high school football, taps a footnote in Marine Corps history for “The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II,” another story about football and much more.
Dozens of Marines in the 6th Division training on the south Pacific island of Guadalcanal had played college football. An offhand observation that the division’s 4th and 29th regiments could each field an all-star team led to the Mosquito Bowl on the insect-infested island on Christmas Eve 1944.
Bissinger’s narrative closely follows the lives of five of them: George Murphy, Tony Butkovich, Robert Bauman,
David Schreiner and John McLaughry. All were in their 20s when they fought at Okinawa. While plenty of other able-bodied men didn’t let the war disrupt their lives, these men postponed offers to play in the NFL, begin careers, marry or start their own families to join the fight.
In exploring the hearts and souls of those who risked everything for their country, Bissinger’s book defines some of the qualities that make America great — then, now and forever. He also showcases the horrors of war and the blunders that cost lives on the battlefield.
In the book’s only misstep, the Mosquito Bowl itself takes up less than a page and doesn’t justify the catchy title. Few details of the game apparently survived. If the title is merely a marketing hook, it does a disservice to the subject at hand. This story doesn’t need a gimmick to sell it.
But then Bissinger’s primary subject was never the Mosquito Bowl itself or even football. Young men going off to war is a familiar story, of course, but one can hope that heroism and sacrifice never go out of fashion or that devotion to duty becomes cliche.