DISCOVERIES

LAZY B

Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest

By Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day

Random House: 316 pp., $24.95

The language in the memoir of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and her brother H. Alan Day about growing up on the largest cattle ranch in Arizona (160,000 acres) reminds me of those no-nonsense New England memoirs that conceal a disdain for the seduction of beauty over hardiness. The moral is: Hard work builds integrity. Don’t expect anyone else to do yours for you. Do the best you can or don’t bother.

“Lazy B” is organized by chapters describing family members and people who lived and worked on the ranch, like Bronco Busting Jim or Bug the Cook. What interests O’Connor most about them is their work ethic. Her father emerges as a powerful, capable lord of his own domain, meting out justice that is always deserved, never questioned. Her mother never falters, never seems to tire of ranch life, is always immaculately dressed and someone a child could be proud of.

We are not used to life stories in which emotional hurdles are leaped in a single bound. There is much to learn here about roping and herding and training horses and daily ranch life. But we never learn why one of her aunts died at 20 or why it is OK to refer to living creatures as “a particularly surly mess of beef”? O’Connor has a remarkably detailed memory. A passage that describes how one ranch hand rolled his cigarettes is downright cinematic. How the cowboys moved and did their work is as vivid as the emotional terrain is unclear.

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CRASHING THE PARTY

How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President

By Ralph Nader

Thomas Dunne Books/

St. Martin’s Press: 358 pp., $24.95

Nothing makes your average middle-class liberal madder than the mention of Ralph Nader’s name. Not even naming Richard Nixon. Nader’s explanation for their anger? Democrats “not only fear but despise idealism.” Idealism, he writes with characteristic humility, “took a stand in 2000.” In “Crashing the Party,” Nader describes his motivation to run, how he ran his campaign, what it stood for and what he hopes the Green Party will accomplish in the future. Some of the book tackles those moments in the campaign that he considers particularly disappointing: when, for instance, Gloria Steinem abandoned him, or when he was accused of saying that there were no differences between Bush and Gore (he claims to have said that there were “few differences”) and when some Democrats claimed that “a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush.” (“Bush,” Nader writes, “is a mindless pusher for laws that shield corporations from being held accountable,” what he calls “tort deform.”) He is particularly proud of running an $8-million campaign, as opposed to Al Gore’s $120-million and Bush’s $186-million efforts. He makes, again, an excellent case for the need for another party and for a revitalized Democratic Party. In the end, he seems pleased with what the Greens accomplished and stands by his course. “The fissure opened by this modest Green Party campaign proved to be a much deeper fault line between liberals who believed there were no alternatives and liberals who had endured enough of the commercialized politics of concessions and broken promises.”

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A HOUSE IN CORFU

A Family’s Sojourn in Greece

By Emma Tennant

Henry Holt: 256 pp., $24

Our supply of Peter Mayle bourgeois fugitives has dwindled severely in the last few years. After Francis Mayes’ second book on Tuscany, it’s been downright spotty. Until now.

Emma Tennant’s father, an architect at the head of his own firm in London, picked up in 1965 and moved to Corfu. He designed and built this house on 12 acres with a view of one of the most beautiful bays on the island that he had purchased. He wanted to spend his remaining years painting and sailing, a dream he realized until his death in 1983. They meld as much as possible into village life in Liapades, on the east side of Corfu. Tennant’s life as a freelance writer in London seems barely able to compete with the paradise her parents created. Her descriptions of the island (flora and culture) remind me of Sarah Orne Jewett’s descriptions of Maine, but her mind’s wanderings on Greek history or “The Odyssey” or Lawrence Durrell and Edward Lear are a bit choppy and hard to follow. In Greece, she explains, you’re never alone. In fact, the word for “private” in Greek, she writes is “idiotikos.” Tennant describes the spirit of enjoying another culture more gently, less aggressively than Mayle or even Mayes. She floats through it more dreamily, leaving an even greater desire for some other place.