The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them
Author: Eugen Kogon
By the spring of 1945, the Second World War was drawing to a close in Europe. Allied troops were sweeping through Nazi Germany and discovering the atrocities of SS concentration camps. The first to be reached intact was Buchenwald, in central Germany. American soldiers struggled to make sense of the shocking scenes they witnessed inside. They asked a small group of former inmates to draft a report on the camp. It was led by Eugen Kogon, a German political prisoner who had been an inmate since 1939. The Theory and Practice of Hell is his classic account of life inside.
Unlike many other books by survivors who published immediately after the war, The Theory and Practice of Hell is more than a personal account. It is a horrific examination of life and death inside a Nazi concentration camp, a brutal world of a state within state, and a society without law. But Kogon maintains a dispassionate and critical perspective. He tries to understand how the camp works, to uncover its structure and social organization. He knew that the book would shock some readers and provide others with gruesome fascination. But he firmly believed that he had to show the camp in honest, unflinching detail.
The result is a unique historical document—a complete picture of the society, morality, and politics that fueled the systematic torture of six million human beings. For many years, The Theory and Practice of Hell remained the seminal work on the concentration camps, particularly in Germany. Reissued with an introduction by Nikolaus Waschmann, a leading Holocaust scholar and author of Hilter's Prisons, this important work now demands to be re-read.
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Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest
Author: Sandra Day OConnor
Now, for the first time in paperback, here is the remarkable story of Sandra Day O’Connor’s family and early life, her journey to adulthood in the American Southwest that helped make her the woman she is today—the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America. In this illuminating and unusual book, Sandra Day O’Connor tells, with her brother, Alan, the story of the Day family, and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B ranch in Arizona.
Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, self-reliance, and survival, and how the land, people, and values of the Lazy B shaped them. This fascinating glimpse of life in the Southwest in the last century recounts an important time in American history, and provides an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of the most prominent figures in America.
Washington Post Book World - Jonathan Yardley
Lazy B It is a story about the real American West. Not the West of John Wayne and John Ford, but of hard-working people who took what nature gave them—too much land, too little water—and made it into something productive, valuable and, in the deepest sense of the word, enriching.
New York Times - Linda Greenhouse
In Lazy B., Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother recall their childhoods on a ranch in the Southwest in this engaging memoir.
Book Magazine
By anyone's standards, Sandra Day O'Connor has lived an extraordinary life. In the twenty years since she became the first female justice on the Supreme Court, O'Connor has become a dominant figure in American politics. The pivotal vote on a factionalized court, she is the decisive voice in some of the nation's central controversies and a leading force in the court's recent efforts to restrain the power of government.
Even before she was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1981, though, her success was remarkable. When she graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952, O'Connor faced a legal profession that was virtually closed to women. Refusing to be discouraged, she dedicated herself to a career in public service, distinguishing herself with a series of civil and political positions—from the lowly job of deputy county attorney of San Mateo, California, where she began her career, to majority leader of the Arizona State Senate. Now considered by some pundits to be a shoo-in for the job of chief justice when William Rehnquist retires, O'Connor may well be, as the legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen writes, "the most powerful woman in America."
In this memoir, written with her brother, H. Alan Day, O'Connor tells of the early experiences that formed the bedrock for those achievements. Growing up on her parents' cattle ranch on the border of Arizona and New Mexico, she learned the value of character and responsibility. The land on the Lazy B ranch was rugged and the life was hardscrabble. "The value system we learned was simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity," the authors write. "What counted was competence." For those who could live up toits demands, the ranching life nourished "qualities of honesty, dependability ... and good humor" that served them well throughout their lives.
Celebrating those virtues, O'Connor and her brother have written a version of a classic American narrative. Lazy B is a frontier story, a tale of resourceful people who wrest a living from a difficult land and who cherish their independence from the sissified restraints of the more settled East. For seven decades, the Day ranch was a big, profitable concern—at 60,000 acres, it was "the largest and most successful ranch in the region." But in the high desert of the Southwest, ranching did not come easy. Vast and austerely beautiful though it was, the arid landscape did not lend itself naturally to grazing, and a rancher needed to work hard and long to make a go of it. Growing up, O'Connor and her brother watched as their parents turned a failing business into a thriving enterprise, and their narrative glows with admiration for the achievement. Like many tales of the West, Lazy B speaks earnestly of the beauties of nature, but its story is more concerned with the rugged people who could make the land pay.
O'Connor plainly reveres those resourceful pioneers, and the book offers a series of lovingly etched portraits—most significantly of the writers' father, Harry Day, a stern yet supportive patriarch who dominates the book, but also of a gallery of memorable cowhands. (The writers' mother plays a less prominent role.) Yet, colorful as those figures are, Lazy B never prettifies them. As a justice, O'Connor is renowned for her pragmatic and limited opinions. Unlike some colleagues, she declines to speak of fundamental principles or grand philosophies, an attitude she may have learned on the ranch, where "verbal skills were less important than the ability to know and understand how things work." Her memoir shares something of the same deliberate quality. The writers' account of their childhood is scrupulously deadpan and laconic. One suspects that they'd rather risk boring the reader than commit the sin of being flashy.
The one place Lazy B approaches lyricism is, interestingly, also the most political section of the book. It is a convention of the frontier story to speak elegiacally of a fading way of life, and Lazy B concludes by lamenting that "the era of ranching as we knew it ... is surely gone forever." Unsurprisingly, the book lays the responsibility for that decline at the feet of aggressive government agencies and "bureaucratic overkill." The more interesting feature of Lazy B, however, is the book's honesty in revealing that the roots of the authors' distrust of government may lie less in a history of independence from the state than in a long-term dependence on it. Harry Day was surely a capable and industrious man, but the authors also acknowledge that from its very beginnings the Day ranch benefited from government largesse. Without land purchased by the federal government, the ranch would never have existed. Without meddlesome bureaucrats who propped up cattle prices, fostered irrigation and electrification and protected land at risk of overgrazing, it might not have survived, never mind prospered. For Harry Day, ironically, that fact meant that government was worthy not of gratitude but suspicion. Along with the rest of his legacy, his children carry that attitude forward.
—Sean McCann
Publishers Weekly
Windswept plains, herds of cattle, ornery horses and hard-bitten cowboys fill the childhood memories of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who grew up on the Lazy B, a Texas cattle ranch. In this memoir, she writes of the ranch's history, from its founding in the 1880s by her grandfather to the sad moment when the family sold it in 1986. O'Connor gives a detailed account of ranch life: the hard work, the urgent dependence on rain, the colorful characters who worked on the ranch, the bureaucracy of government officials and land-use permits, and her own happy childhood memories of hours in the saddle. The mood is warm and nostalgic: she does not mention any conflict with her parents, failed romances, serious illnesses or other negative experiences, other than a brief comment that she wasn't happy in one school and switched to another. O'Connor frequently stresses that to succeed in ranching, one had to be tough, resilient and hardworking, but she contrasts that toughness with the ranchers' warm hearts. Talking of her babyhood surrounded by cowboys, she says, "My babysitters were tobacco-chewing, unshaven, unbathed, Levi-clad and tough as nails, but they would talk baby talk and try for hours to keep baby Sandra happy." O'Connor is not a professional narrator and it shows: she is clearly "reading aloud" without spontaneity, and her reading is mostly one-note, without the varied inflections and shades of emotion that a professional narrator would bring. Still, her voice is pleasant, with a slight Texas twang, and she conveys warmth and affection for her childhood home. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 10, 2001). (Jan.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Publishers Weekly
This memoir-cum-natural history evinces a clear picture of the American Southwest during the early to mid 20th century. Though O'Connor's name initially conjures images of austere black robes and the halls of justice, a very different person emerges from the childhood recalled here. A collaboration between O'Connor and her brother, the book recounts the lives of their parents "MO" and "DA" (pronounced "M.O." and "D.A.") and the colorful characters who helped run the Lazy B ranch. Growing up on the Gila River flowing from New Mexico to Arizona during the 1930s and '40s, the children quickly learned about the desert's abundant and dangerous creatures and plants. And no experience of Western ranch life is complete without the constant struggle for water leading to disputes over grazing rights. Though life was often harsh, MO kept her children educated and imbued with a sense of dignity. The authors' keen sense of loyalty to their childhood home endures: "Life at the ranch involved all of these components association with our old-time, long-suffering, good-natured cowboys; living in isolation with just one another and with few luxuries; ... seeing the plant, animal, insect, and bird life of the Southwest close at hand; and enjoying the love and companionship of MO and DA." O'Connor attended Stanford University, realizing the dreams of her grandfather and father; there, she took a class from a law school professor and started down the path leading to the U.S. Supreme Court. Day ran the Lazy B until its sale in 1986. The authors' delight in Lazy B enhances this quiet account of a bygone era. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
KLIATT
O'Connor and her brother Alan, nine years her junior, teamed up to write an account of growing up on "the largest and most successful ranch in the region," a spread one-fifth the size of the state of Rhode Island, located on the Arizona/New Mexico border. Brief essays introduced by b/w photos and incisive quotations give thumbnail bios of their parents and individual cowboys who worked on the ranch. Other chapters tell of drought and rain, animals (cattle, horses, pets, wildlife), their adobe home, family life, going to school, the local bar, and always the hard work and careful management of resources that supported them all. O'Connor's parents loved each other deeply their whole lives and set education for their three children (their sister Ann is near Alan's age) as a high priority. There is no discussion of politics and little about the professional path that led to Sandra's appointment by Reagan to the Supreme Court. She went to a nearby high school, attended Stanford University Law School, and married a lawyer from San Francisco. She became the mother of three sons and always, until the death of her parents and the sale of the ranch, found solace in its open spaces and the routines of life there. The only really discordant note in the book concerns the increasing involvement of the government and environmentalists with the management of the land, an interference she felt was often ill-informed and led to the breaking up of the ranch and finally its sale. One often feels that the Days smoothed off the roughest edges of their experience, but their story is told with appreciation for all, humans and animals, that had a part in their lives. It is an inspiring story of the benefits thatcan be gained by a life lived with meaningful work and consistently applied positive life principles. The use of childhood nicknames, such as the initials MO and DA, when referring to their parents, grates throughout, but that is not a reason to reject the book. KLIATT Codes: SA;Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, 318p. illus., Boardman
Library Journal
Supreme Court justices tend to be reticent about their background, and they often disclaim its influence on their thinking. Thus, a memoir purporting to disclose "how Sandra Day O'Connor became the woman she is today" promises to be exciting. This memoir is, however, one of the least revealing examples of the genre. When O'Connor was growing up, her family owned the Lazy B ranch in Arizona. But after the age of six (except for one year in high school), O'Connor lived with her grandmother in El Paso during the school year, an experience about which she says little. Her descriptions of life on the ranch thus rely heavily on summers and vacations and accounts from her brother, Alan, who stayed and ultimately came to run the ranch until it was sold in 1986. We learn about breaking horses and cattle round-ups and the foibles and personalities of various ranch hands. But the book contains only brief descriptions of O'Connor's parents and almost no discussion of ideas. The episodic organization is choppy and the writing often stilted. Still, this book may have an audience. For large public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/01.] Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Three generations of the Day family worked a 300-acre ranch straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border, from the 1880s to 1986. During that time, family members experienced all the aspects of Western life that most of us today can only encounter through films or books. Reading Lazy B, teens will find themselves in the middle of cattle roundups, stampedes, floods, and drought. Through photographs, letters, personal experiences, and anecdotes, the authors present a slice of day-to-day life on a working ranch in the 20th century. Readers meet the cowboys, learn what it takes to break a wild horse, find out how a roundup works, and see the government's growing role in ranching and farming. This is not the book for those wanting to learn the secrets of O'Connor's successful rise to a seat on the Supreme Court. But for those wanting a glimpse of a rapidly disappearing way of life, this title presents an engaging and compelling account.-Pamela B. Rearden, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The Supreme Court justice, writing with her brother, turns in an affectionate portrait of life on a desert ranch in the years before WWII.
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