H. Alan Day

A nostalgic cowboy-romance in non-fiction form. This is the memoir of a supreme court justice, not about her life, but about her birthplace and her father. Think if Arya Stark wrote a book about Winterfell, but Americanized completely.

Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother write a book that spends few words on politics, however history of American law is in there regardless. At times not so subtle, this book chronicles the lives of those who lived on The Lazy B ranch, and the changing world distantly around them. If you look you can see America evolve in the background, legally, infrastructurally, and ecologically.

Politics are downplayed to a minimal. Nothing partisan or truly controversial. It is simply inter-mountain ranching of the twentieth century laid bare for a reader to observe.… (más)

LAZY B, by Sandra Day O'Connor and H. Alan Day.

An informative account of the early life and family of Supreme Court Justice O'Connor, LAZY B gives a fairly detailed account of what a family ranch was all about from the 1930s (Day-O'Connor was born in 1930)up into the 1980s, when both her parents died. Not long after that, the Day family ranch was sold.

While O'Connor's story was interesting enough, its telling remained rather flat and humorless and never really engaged me, and I found myself skimming over many of the short anecdotal sections which make up the book. Sandra was the oldest of three children and there was a nine-year gap between her and her two siblings, Ann and Alan. She was sent away to school in El Paso and so spent less time on the ranch than did her siblings, especially her brother, who took over the day to day operations of the ranch as her father became older. I suspect many of the memories laid down here came not from Sandra but from her brother Alan, who is credited as co-author, even though the book is presented in first person. So, while the book is well-written enough, it has a ghost-written feel to it, which made it less engagaging. I would recommend it mostly for its historical importance, i.e. this is how one of our Supreme Court Justices grew up, and this is what ranch life in the desert Southwest was lke from the Depression years through the end of the twentieth century.… (más)

The author of this interesting book was a cattle rancher. He bought a third ranch because the spread was so gorgeous, wanting to care for the land and practice good husbandry. Got the idea to run horses on it instead of cattle, and after lots of planning, research, even visit to the nation's capital, he got permission and funding from the Bureau of Land Management to turn it into a wild horse sanctuary. Fifteen hundred unadoptable mustangs, which had previously been living in corrals at a management facility, became his to care for. It's heartening to read about someone who cares about animals so much and wants to better their lives. How he studied the horses' behavior, learned how to work with them, even taught them (everyone thought that was impossible) to accept human presence and follow men on horseback, so he could move them between pastures to keep the land sustainable.

Throughout his account of establishing and running the wild horse sanctuary, the pages are enriched with stories of past horses and experiences that he learned from. I really enjoyed reading all that. There's also frustrations in running the ranch and sticky doings with bureaucracy. In the end I found myself becoming angry alongside the author at the decisions of higher-ups that didn't at all seem to be in the best interest of the horses. And even though he ended up sans wild horses, turning the ranch back into a cattle operation, there is a relatively good ending and I found I was satisfied with how things turned out (mostly because I appreciated the author's integrity in how he worked with animals, people, and the land).

more at the Dogear Diary… (más)