Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

By Sally Smith Bedell

After reading a book on Catherine the Great, Goodreads.com recommended me this book on Queen Elizabeth.  So I added this recently published book to my library wish list, and got in line for it.  At close to 600 pages, you have to be in for a dedicated read in order to finish it before it is due back to the library.  This was not an issue as it was a very engaging read to learn more about the path of this monarch who has helped lead her Commonwealth through many ups and downs of recent history.  As I read about Elizabeth's more private side with her friends and family, I couldn't help comparing her to my grandmother, who would have been close to the same age.  They're both matriarchs with a strong sense of community and familial duty.  My grandmother may not have had the same scope of influence, but I saw many similarities into how these women guided people without telling them exactly what to do.  Some of my favorite passages are highlighted here:

The Queen and Prince Phillip were being honored at a dinner, and the question came up on why it took the monarch so long to prepare for the evening.  Her private secretary responded "The Queen needs her tiara time!".  She has a kit to decorate various tiaras with optional pearl or gemstone drops.  p 320.  This part just cracked me up.  Up until this point, the Queen was portrayed with a great sense of seriousness, and this passage made her a bit more human in my eyes.  I would want a similar kit if I had a few tiaras to choose from.

A powerful source of the Queen's success as a sovereign has been her inscrutability and avoidance of controversy.  With the exception of a few relatively inconsequential remarks over the years, her political views remained a matter of conjecture.  p 488.  While living in the United States with all of the celebrity drama, and in the age of YouTube and Facebook, this passage summed up quite a bit about the Queen and how her style is quite different.  For the most part, she does not openly or forcefully exert her opinion.  It took quite a bit of convincing to get her to live broadcasts as TVs became commonplace.

"One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it," said Kenneth Rose.  When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity.  It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly.  But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades.  p 505.  Like the previous passage I shared, this again highlighted the leadership style the Queen has used in her almost 60 years on the throne.

The goal of the author was to publish this book in conjunction with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.  Her challenge "was to show her private side while explaining how she has handles her public role" p  532.  After reading this book, I'd say the author met her goal and would recommend others who want to know about this monarch to try this book.

Southern Italian Cooking

Recently, three members of our book club participated in a southern Italian cooking class.  In preparation for this class, our optional reading selection was The Love Goddesses Cooking School, by Melissa Senate.  In this light read, Holly inherits her Italian grandmother's cooking school / deli and needs to improve her technique and skills to make the business thrive.  It was a decent read, but I think our cooking class was much more entertaining.

The instructor teaches all over the metro area, and has different themed cooking classes.  He has been a chef in several well known local restaurants, and now runs his own catering business and does these types of cooking classes.  In this course, we students mostly watched as he demonstrated techniques and prepared recipes.  I say mostly watched, because we did have the hands-on experience of making our own gnocchi, filling cannoli, and preparing the panzanella salad.  I think we also taught the instructor and the class some valuable lessons, like the importance of composting your leftover produce and egg shells.

The instructor was quite the riot and didn't mind making the occasional mess.  I've found most of the community ed instructors to be quirky for the classes I've enrolled in, and that makes them all the more fun.  My goals from this most recent class are to:
1)  Make my own marinara sauce
2)  Try making pesto (even if the food processor I just bought didn't work!)
3)  Whip together a panzanella (bread salad).  Who knew mixing together raw vegetables that I normally don't like on their own could be wonderful in a mix with toasted bread and a vinaigrette?
4)  Prepare at least one batch of gnocchi, even if it means I have to learn how to properly bake a potato

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming

By Mike Brown

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  If you've been through a science class in school, it can seem that science is an orderly process, well thought out, without a lot of controversy.  This book delves into a subject and illustrates what scientific discoveries really look like - months or years of research before making announcements, controversy, and perhaps more time analyzing data on a computer than actually collecting it via telescopes.  Mike Brown does it in a way that is engaging and easy to understand.  Here are some points on the origin of planets, and how the definition has changed in recent years:

p 21 - The original ancient Greek meaning of the word planet was simply "wanderer," or something that moved in the sky.  As the sky slowly revolves throughout the year, the stars stay in fixed patterns while the wanderers move separately and conspicuously through the constellations of the zodiac.  There are five visible planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

p 21 - 22 - Our basic units of time are based on the sky: A year traced the time it took for the sun to go all the way around the sky to reappear at the same location again, while a month ("moon"-th) is the amount of time it takes for the moon to circle the earth.  The seven days of the week are even named after the seven original planets.  Sunday, Mo[o]nday and Satur[n]day.  Tiw was an ancient Germanic god of war, as Mars was to the Romans, so Tuesday is actually Mars' day, Wednesday is Woden's day, the carrier of the dead, equivalent to one of the roles of Mercury.  Thor was the Norse god of thunder, similar to Jupiter in Roman mythology.  Friday is the day of Venus in the guise of the Norse Frigga, the goddess of married love.

p 27 - On the discovery of Pluto - some astronomers didn't want to call Pluto a planet, and thought perhaps it was better classified as an asteroid.  Though it looked like and behaved like no other planet known, there was no other way to classify it, so it became accepted as the ninth planet, had the element plutonium named after it, and remained unchallenged for almost seventy years as the tiny lonely oddball at the edge of the solar system.  In the early 2000s, there were discoveries made that showed that Pluto is actually part of a vast population of the Kuiper belt.  The new discovery of the Kuiper belt would force astronomers to reconsider the status of Pluto.

p 69 - On naming things in the sky - There are rules, decided upon by the International Astronomical Union, for the naming of most everything in the sky.  Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moons of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters.  For objects in the Kuiper belt, the rules said the name had to be a creation deity.

Mike Brown continues to relay his story of making discoveries of possible planets on the edges of our solar system.  It is an educating and entertaining tale of the work it takes to do this, how the scientific community is informed of the progress, how he nick-named and formally named his discoveries, how he kept (or didn't keep) a work-life balance, and ultimately, how one of his discoveries affected the status of Pluto.

(This picture isn't of Pluto or the Kuiper belt, just an image of my favorite planet, Saturn)

Invaluable References

In high school or college, at some point a dictionary was a required reading companion for most of us.  I still keep a dictionary / thesaurus on my reading shelf and try to make use of it when I need to look up the meaning of a word.

As I was reading Catherine the Great a few months ago, I realized how helpful it would be to have an atlas.  My husband must have caught the hint as I repeatedly mentioned this statement and he presented me with the National Geographic Collegiate World Atlas for my birthday. It is fantastic!  Besides the detailed geographical maps, there are additional maps with economic layers, etc.  Here are a couple of pictures from my newest reference:

So far I've used it while finishing up Catherine the Great to follow her conquests into Turkey, Poland and some of the other Baltic areas.  It also came in handy while reading Thunderstruck to see where the trials took place for setting up wireless communication in the early 1900s in England, Canada and New England.

At some point, I should have a review of Maphead by Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy whiz from a few years book.  Apparently we share a similar fascination of maps, and I'm on the wait list at the library... to be continued!