"An instant American icon--the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court--tells the story of her life before becoming a judge in an inspiring, surprisingly personal memoir. With startling candor and intimacy, Sonia Sotomayor recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a progress that is testament to her extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself. She writes of her precarious childhood and the refuge she took with her passionately spirited paternal grandmother. She describes her resolve as a young girl to become a lawyer, and how she made this dream become reality: valedictorian of her high school class, summa cum laude at Princeton, Yale Law, prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.'s office, private practice, federal district judge before the age of forty. She writes about her deeply valued mentors, about her failed marriage, about her cherished family of friends. Through her still-astonished eyes, America's infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this warm and honest book, destined to become a classic of self-discovery and self-invention, alongside Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father"--

Introduction -- Entryway passages : demystifying dimensions -- Restricted passages : rolled-up extra dimensions -- Exclusive passages : branes, braneworlds, and the bulk -- Approaches to theoretical physics -- Relativity : the evolution of Einstein's gravity -- Quantum mechanics : principled uncertainty, the principal uncertainties, and the uncertainty principle -- The standard model of particle physics : matter's most basic known structure -- Experimental interlude : verifying the standard model -- Symmetry : the essential organizing principle -- The origin of elementary particle masses : spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism -- Scaling and grand unification : relating interactions at different lengths and energies -- The hierarchy problem : the only effective trickle-down theory -- Supersymmetry : a leap beyond the standard model -- Allegro (ma non troppo) passage for strings -- Supporting passages : brane development -- Bustling passages : braneworlds -- Sparsely populated passages : multiverses and sequestering -- Leaky passages : fingerprints of extra dimensions -- Voluminous passages : large extra dimensions -- Warped passage : a solution to the hierarchy problem -- The warped annotated "Alice" -- Profound passage : an infinite extra dimension -- A reflective and expansive passage -- Extra dimensions : are you in or out? .