Even in this day and age, young girls need to know that any door can be opened with a bit of pushing. This book not only brings to life a great role model, it shows that she is a real person. Ms. McElroy's simple, spare prose never condescends, but clearly sketches both the professional and family persona of her subject. It is a book that will be treasured by the owner and her (or even his) parents. If this is the beginning of a series, I look forward to the next one -- the author has found a valuable place on our bookshelves and in our hearts.

My favorite part ot the book was when it talked about her life and what it was like to live on a farm without electrisity,plumbing and without a lot more. I would like to recconend this book to any body who likes books that are extremely descriptive. I really enjoyed this book and I hope that you do to.

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.

I picked up this book because I am currently in law school and I felt like it would give me some insight into the political undertones of the Supreme Court. However, I found it to be boring beyond belief. It was written like a 5th grade civics textbook. Justice O'Connor went on and on about the historical meaning of the constitution. She spent very little time on influential cases the Supreme Court has looked at in the past 20 years. It was really not at all worth the time. Even for someone who is just looking to learn the basics of the Supreme Court, you would fare better by pulling out an encyclopedia. It is certainly more concise.

As other reviewers have noted, this book is not an in-depth analysis of legal issues. Rather it's an attempt to provide an informal, backstage glimpse into life on the Supreme Court from the perspective of the first woman justice.

Some of her points will loom large with women who, like me, were "firsts" on a much smaller scale. For instance, she notes the significance of changing the nameplates from "Mr. Justice..." to simply "Justice..."

As we might expect from a down-home woman who was brought up riding horses in Arizona, O'Connor remains modest and matter-of-fact. She recognizes her role and the respect she deserves. She describes the difficulties of women in the law, frankly and without self-pity, and acknowledges the preference for sharing experiences with other women in law.

And her behind-the-scenes glimpses reflect her perspective as a woman who cares about people as well as principles. She shares wonderful anecdotes about Thurgood Marshall. And she says absolutely nothing about Clarence Thomas, even when discussing the process of confirmation to the Court.

In my favorite chapter, Justice O'Connor raises strong, provocative questions about jury duty. Established 900 years ago, she says, the concept remains sound but the implementation is due for an overhaul. Why shouldn't jurors take notes? Why should they be subjected to long waits in uncomfortable rooms? And jurors surely deserve better compensation, she says.

O'Connor compares US juries with those of other English-speaking countries -- England, Canada, and Australia. She notes that other countries do not send civil cases to juries as frequently, so jurors do not have to sit through days and weeks of complex testimony that leaves them so bewildered they may as well flip a coin. (Actually a coin flip would be fairer than trying to sort through half-remembered facts!) And lawyers spend so much time psyching out jurors they want to challenge that jury selection can take weeks. In Europe, says O'Connor, juries are selected in minutes!

If anything, Justice O'Connor doesn't go far enough. Paying for jury service won't help a self-employed or sales person who could lose an account worth thousands of dollars. And jurors often experience serious emotional symptoms following a difficult case.

However, it is refreshing to hear such honesty from a distinguished member of the legal profession. O'Connor even recalls the New Yorker cartoon where a jury foreman tells the judge, "We find the defendant guilty and sentence him to jury duty." So true! I'm told that some juries begin to identify with criminal defendants -- they're treated in more or less the same way!

If you know someone who's called for jury duty, buy him or her this book -- good reading for the interminable, senseless waiting time.

This is an excellently written volume about the basic story of the Supreme Court with some historical as well as personal stories related by the esteemed justice. This is hardly a scholarly work but I don't think it was intended to be and I feel that Joe and Jane Public would find it extremely interesting. Justice O'Connor is a talented writer and I heartily recommend this book for your early summer reading lists.

Goldstone is a skillful lawyer and a dedicated human rights activist. He played a central role in South Africa's transition to democracy and in the purusit of justice in the former Yugoslavia. He has a sharp eye for bureaucratic absurdity (especially in the UN). He knows world leaders and could have written a fascinating "inside" history. Instead, he produced this short, lightweight book comprised of little more than anecdotes and name-dropping. It's incredible that Yale University Press saw fit to publish it. We can only hope that Goldstone will turn to writing a serious autobiography after he steps down from the South African Constitutional Court.

I was looking for the specifics of the South African problem and reconciliation. Goldstone focuses on the logistics of his position as judge/prosecutor, rather than on specific crimes and prosecutions. O'Connor's introduction is the most interesting part of the book.

Makes you appreciate the success of the Nuremberg trila and how it was put togather in the days witout modern cominications and it uniting of the world in the quest for international justice against perpetrators of war crimes

This is a heartwarming story. This book is about Sandra Day O'Connor in the early years, late years and the politic years. This story may tell you somethings you never new about Justice O'Connor it told me somethings I never new. Read lots about Justice O'Connor in this book.