The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years is a comprehensive memoir of Justice John Paul Stevens. He offers an intimate and illuminating account of his service on the US Supreme Court. It is a must read for those trying to better understand the US and the constitution, according to critics. Justice Stevens witnessed so much American history as he sat on the top court for 34 years as one of America’s most beloved jurists. Justice Stevens was appointed to the court by former President Gerald Ford and resigned during Barack Obama’s first term in office. Ford wrote in 2005 that he was prepared to let “history’s judgment” of his presidency rest exclusively on his decision in 1975 to nominate Stevens. Barack Obama scrawled his endorsement on a birthday note to Stevens in 2014 — “We miss you on the Court!” “The cross-party embrace of Stevens by these two presidents shows the distance to the right the Republican Party has traveled from Ford to President Donald Trump far more than Stevens’s own shift in the opposite direction,” critic Emily Bazelon said in a review for The New York Times.