Product Description

Now, for the first time in paperback, here is the remarkable story of Sandra Day O’Connor’s family and early life, her journey to adulthood in the American Southwest that helped make her the woman she is today—the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America. In this illuminating and unusual book, Sandra Day O’Connor tells, with her brother, Alan, the story of the Day family, and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B ranch in Arizona.

Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, self-reliance, and survival, and how the land, people, and values of the Lazy B shaped them. This fascinating glimpse of life in the Southwest in the last century recounts an important time in American history, and provides an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of the most prominent figures in America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260107 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-08
• Released on: 2003-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 317 pages

Amazon.com Review
Deep in the granite hills of eastern Arizona in 1880, H.C. Day founded the Lazy B ranch, where U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother Alan spent their youth, a time they recall in this affectionate joint memoir.

"We belonged to the Lazy B, and it belonged to each of us," write O'Connor and Day. "We thought it would always be there." Weathering events from the Great Depression to cyclical drought, they worked the ranch's 300 square miles alongside a colorful crew of cowboys, learning the ways of cattle, horses, and people, lessons they share in well-turned anecdotes. They also learned a system of values that "was simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity," one that has followed them into the larger world. Court watchers and fans of Western writing alike will take pleasure in this multigenerational account of life on the range. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
This memoir-cum-natural history evinces a clear picture of the American Southwest during the early to mid 20th century. Though O'Connor's name initially conjures images of austere black robes and the halls of justice, a very different person emerges from the childhood recalled here. A collaboration between O'Connor and her brother, the book recounts the lives of their parents "MO" and "DA" (pronounced "M.O." and "D.A.") and the colorful characters who helped run the Lazy B ranch. Growing up on the Gila River flowing from New Mexico to Arizona during the 1930s and '40s, the children quickly learned about the desert's abundant and dangerous creatures and plants. And no experience of Western ranch life is complete without the constant struggle for water leading to disputes over grazing rights. Though life was often harsh, MO kept her children educated and imbued with a sense of dignity. The authors' keen sense of loyalty to their childhood home endures: "Life at the ranch involved all of these components association with our old-time, long-suffering, good-natured cowboys; living in isolation with just one another and with few luxuries; ... seeing the plant, animal, insect, and bird life of the Southwest close at hand; and enjoying the love and companionship of MO and DA." O'Connor attended Stanford University, realizing the dreams of her grandfather and father; there, she took a class from a law school professor and started down the path leading to the U.S. Supreme Court. Day ran the Lazy B until its sale in 1986. The authors' delight in Lazy B enhances this quiet account of a bygone era. B&w photos throughout. (On-sale: Jan. 29)

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Three generations of the Day family worked a 300-acre ranch straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border, from the 1880s to 1986. During that time, family members experienced all the aspects of Western life that most of us today can only encounter through films or books. Reading Lazy B, teens will find themselves in the middle of cattle roundups, stampedes, floods, and drought. Through photographs, letters, personal experiences, and anecdotes, the authors present a slice of day-to-day life on a working ranch in the 20th century. Readers meet the cowboys, learn what it takes to break a wild horse, find out how a roundup works, and see the government's growing role in ranching and farming. This is not the book for those wanting to learn the secrets of O'Connor's successful rise to a seat on the Supreme Court. But for those wanting a glimpse of a rapidly disappearing way of life, this title presents an engaging and compelling account.
Pamela B. Rearden, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Oh to be at Lazy B....
Sandra Day O'Connor and Alan Day have written a book that portrays ranch life in a desolte area of Arizona and New Mexico so vividly that the reader is swept away to a place and time that can be visited only through reading the Day's memoirs.

Most people know little of southwestern ranch life except as presented through Hollywood's interpretation on the silver screen. "Lazy B" reveals the every day struggles of ranchers and cowboys, with intimate knowledge of and compassion for the characters, the cattle and for the land. The authors share what it was like to grow up on a ranch far from a paved road and without neighbors or playmates. Some of the antics are side-splitters. The hard work and uncertainties of life on the ranch are told in a way that touches the reader's sensitivities.

It was hard to put "Lazy B" down while reading it and I was sad when I finished it; it was something joyful and heart-warming to look forward to every evening. I heartily recommend "Lasy B" for its marvelous stories, its historical value, its humor and the strength of character it presents. One of our country's most prominent women and her brother have given us a wonderful gift by sharing their lives in this book.

From the Southwest to the Supreme Court
Despite her status as the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court and her background as a Stanford graduate and prominent lawyer, Sandra Day O'Connor was not--repeat NOT--a child of privilege. Granted her Daddy ran a cattle ranch spanning two states and she never really wanted for anything, but the childhood which she relates (with her co-author, brother Alan) in "Lazy B" was a most challenging, liberating, independence-building one indeed.

Her grandparents started this life and her parents took over--running a huge cattle ranch, raising three children and instilling traditional values of frugality, self-reliance and hard work. We learn about her dad, DA; her mom, MO; and several interesting, independent cowboys, among them Rastus, Jim Brister, Bug Quinn and Claude Tipets. Just names in a review, these lonely, uneducated, but remarkable men take on real life--real cowboys in the twentieth century! Here's an example: Brister, to tame an unruly horse, wrestles it to the ground in a display of awesome strength--while sitting on its back!!

Sandra accompanies her dad on his treks around the huge ranch fixing windmills, rounding up cattle, fixing fences, and, in general, doing the work of the ranch. She is an important part in the running of the ranch. Her father barely acknwledges her when she is late delivering lunch to the men working far from the homestead--despte the fact that she has had to change a flat tire on the ancient truck with its frozen lugnuts all by herself.

The book stays focused on her childhood, her family and the ranch. We learn about her adult life, including her appointment to the Supreme Court in just a few pages. At first I was surprised at such a cursory treatment of such an important career. But in learning about her childhood upbringing on the Lazy B we really learn all about the adult Sandra Day O'Connor. This is an interesting read both as biography and as the evocation of a vanished time and place. I recommend it highly.

Only the B was Lazy
Growing up in a city, I always wondered during car trips through ranchland how the people there lived. Was it a hard life? Lonely? Were they like us in the city?

I knew from movies and TV that calves in pastures were grown into large steers through a gradual process of fistfighting and gunslinging, with the cowboys taking frequent breaks to drink whiskey and play poker. But that was only part of the story. What role did the women and children play? Why the windmills? Who provided basic services?

All these questions and more have now been answered by a Supreme Court Justice, of all things. Lazy B is Sandra Day O'Connor's memoir of her girlhood on a ranch in the desert Southwest. The simple unaffected style of her writing is just right to convey the power of the story: a family living on a desolate ranch for 113 years--a happy family, a resourceful and persistent family.

The Day ranch had already been operating for 50 years when Sandra was born in 1930, and was still going strong when she was appointed to the high court 51 years later. The Days didn't have hot running water until 1937, but when they did it was from a solar heater designed by Sandra's father--40 years ahead of the solar energy craze of the 1970s.

That sort of self reliance and innovation is one of the main themes of the book: when they needed more water they built windmills to bring it up out of the ground. When the windmills broke, they fixed them. Before the windmills and solar heater, the limited hot water for bathing was used in sequence: first Sandra's mother, then her father, then the children, then the ranch hands, if they had any interest in the water that remained. Not a cushy life, but several of the cowboys liked it enough to stay at Lazy B for over 50 years.

The self-reliance in the area of first aid is even more striking: Sandra's father successfully mending the uterus of a cow with a wine bottle and some stitches; one of the cowhands giving himself a root canal with red hot baling wire, or taping his broken finger to a nail so he could keep working.

And while all of them--Mom,Dad,kids,cowhands--did whatever they had to do to keep working, O'Connor's memories are overwhelmingly happy ones of card games and wild animal pets and riding through the desert and, more than anything else, conversations. One gets the impression that no one ever had a better childhood.

O'Connor may or may not be a great justice--I don't know much about the law--but it seems to me that she was a part of something great long before she ever got a law degree. A happy family and a solvent ranch are two things which are hard to maintain for more than a dozen years. The Days did it for a dozen plus a year and a century. Looking at the picture on page 257, I see the very bedrock of the country.