I found this book to be an invaluable assest and reference text. As a resident needing a thorough reference at home for this text will be a welcome addition to my library (and the first place I head to late at night). It systematically breaks down each chapter into clear, clinically important areas so you can easily find what you need.

One Belfast Boy begins with An Old Story, a very brief history of Northern Ireland. It then continues with A New Story, which is about young Liam's life in Belfast. The text follows Liam through several of his days at home, in the neighborhood, at school, and with the boxing club. The photos which illustrate this book tell their own story, sometimes illuminating an event such as the pre-school soccer game; sometimes chilling the reader with a terrifying contrast: boys leaving school / soldier watching through his gunsight. Touching, moving, excellent book which gives new meaning to that sometimes hackneyed term, "cross-cultural."

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.

Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother, H. Alan Day, tell the story of growing up in the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona. The book is organized as a series of vignettes ranging from character sketches of the cowboys who spent their lives on the ranch to rain to the BLM.

I loved this book. I first became aware of it during a trip to southern Arizona. The authors describe a way of life -- on an isolated cattle ranch -- that is almost extinct. I knew that water was important in such a land, but I didn't know that the majority of the time of the owners and employees of the ranch was spent in maintaining the wells, windmills and pumps that provided that water.

I also enjoyed comparing the book to Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daybreak, his memoir of his childhood in rural south Georgia during a similar time period.

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.