Rating: 
Summary: Semi-BORING
Review: This book seemed politically written. The "right" word took center-stage over the substance.
Rating:
Summary: Semi-BORING
Review: This book seemed politically written. The "right" word took center-stage over the substance.
Rating: 
Summary: Vanishing Way of Life
Review: This is a very pleasant book to read. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother Alan Day have written a memoir of growing up on a cattle ranch in the Southwest. For those who have little idea what is involved in ranching the book is very educational. Sandra and her brother point out the degree to which their lives revolved around the limited water available. The ranch contained windwills which often pumped water from depths as deep as 300 to 500 feet into containers for the cattle to drink. Much ranch work simply involved maintaining and fixing problems with the windwills when they fell into disrepair. Other jobs with which most non-ranchers have little familiarity include branding cattle, marking their ears, nursing sick animals, rounding up strays, and fixing fences that have fallen down. Its not the kind of work one sees in big cities and one definitely sees how different a lifestyle ranching is/was.The description of the various cowboys who worked on the ranch was fascinating. What I found most amazing was that almost all of them lived to very old ages, despite limited health care and working in a dangerous occupation. One story that stays in my mind is the cowboy who died at age 75, but only because he was thrown from a horse at a rodeo event and broke his neck! Sandra Day O'Connor certainly had a different life than most children. She spent summers working on her ranch with her family. The rest of the year she spent living with relatives in El Paso, TX attending primary and secondary school. It was a life that seemed certain to breed quite a bit of independence. Seeing this, it is not at all hard to imagine Sandra as the first woman U.S. Supreme Court Justice. The authors' book fails only in one sense. They are highly critical of government regulation by the Bureau of Land Management. Certainly, public land regulation has been imperfect. The reality is the USA had no real regulation of grazing or ranching until the 1930's with the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act. At the time the act was passed, severe overgrazing and depletion of grasslands and pasture on the public domain had occurred. It is against this background one must understand the need of the BLM to reduce grazing and impose fees prohibitive of grazing in some areas. The authors repeatedly emphasize how arid the ranch they lived upon was. It takes years for nature to recover from overgrazing in such conditions. The Lazy B Ranch may have been run in a highly responsible fashion. However, even if this was the case it is doubtful many other ranchers exhibited this amount of responsibility. Its an interesting book about ranching, family, and growing up. For someone who doesn't want anything deep, but something down to earth, I recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Facinating Portrail of a Time Gone...By a Facinating Woman
Review: This is a wonderful book. It's warm, funny, well written and packed with total authenticity of ranch life in the Southwest. How do I know? During the past 35 years, I've talked to dozens of ranchers in Arizona and New Mexico who tell many similar stories with the same buoyant spirit. Some of her Dad's comments could have come from my Dad, who was raised on a farm. This book was like a trip back to any one of dozens of ranches, or my Grandma's farm. O'Connor says it's about a lost way of life. True, in part. Ranch kids no longer grow up living by kerosene lanterns, many now have indoor running water and even flush toilets. The world she describes was as true of stately English manor houses a century ago, that Americans now find so charming; and Canadian farms; and most US farms and ranches. But even today, ranchers in remote areas of Catron and Cibola counties in New Mexico live in almost the same isolation that O'Connor describes so poetically and eloquently. Ranching is a great life, if you like isolation and the self-reliance it generates. Keep in mind the Lazy B covered 150,000 acres, almost one quarter the area of Rhode Island. Yet, in the fragile Southwest, seared by 100 plus degree days and less than 10-inches of rain per year, the Lazy B could support only about 2,000 cows. It was never an easy life. O'Connor sums it up nicely, "Rain was our life's blood." One theme comes through loud and clear, "you accepted responsibility for your actions and never complained if things didn't go your way." In brief, don't whine, don't complain, don't look for others to blame, and don't hide behind someone's skirts. Her description of making ice cream sums up rural life in the 1930s and 1940s: "We broke up the block of ice with an ice pick and fitted it around the metal container in the large bucket and spread the salt over the ice. Ann, Alan, and I took turns cranking the handle. It took about three-quarters of an hour to freeze. When one of us tired, another would take over. As the ice cream hardened, it was much harder to turn the crank. When we could turn it no more, we called to MO to open it up. She removed the salty ice at the top and then the crank handle. Finally, off came the top, and she lifted out the paddles, or the 'dasher,' as it was called. The child who cranked the hardest got to lick the dasher first. Then we all piled ice cream in our bowls and ate until we felt a pain in our foreheads from the cold ice cream. The hard work somehow made it taste better." Now that she has a day job as a US Supreme Court Justice, keep those attitudes in mind whenever you hear about a legal decision by O'Connor. She is a pure old-fashioned conservative; a believer in personal responsibility and hard work rather than handouts, excuses and born-again Christian rants. She rarely attended formal church services; anyone brought up on a ranch can understand the sentiment of her father when he told her, "There is surely something -- a God if you will -- who created all of this. And we don't have to go to church to appreciate it. It is all around us. This is our church." She doesn't preach, moralize or offer political judgments. Instead, she fondly looks back with a pang of regret that it can never be repeated. Long before President George Bush made it a hollow political slogan, her family lived "compassionate conservatism" which never hesitated to help those in need, to serve their country and get things done without expecting help from others. No work was too hard and no burden too great to defeat them; they shared a great life because, "The hard work somehow made it taste better." Unlike Bush, who inherited or was given everything in his life, O'Connor worked for and earned everything she's accomplished. There's a world of difference between the two paths to success; it shows, and this book extols the merits of work instead of family connections with rich and power friends. She is the best of all Reagan's appointments, and her contributions to making America a better place for all of us will be remembered long after his other decisions are buried and forgotten. Granted, I dealt with O'Connor when she was Senate Majority Leader in Arizona. I liked her then for her honesty, ability and sharp intelligence. She was the same person then as portrayed in this book, dedicated to getting the job done in a way that was honest, fair and with respect for everyone involved. You won't find a better book about Arizona ranch life, the character of an honest conservative and the good humour and determination of a woman who succeeded despite every obstacle strewn in her path. America is better because of her, and this book fondly recalls the land, people and life that made her an outstanding conservative, jurist, parent and woman.
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