January 2013: Madam Secretary : A Memoir (Albright)

Post date: Jan 28, 2013 12:28:43 AM

It was a pleasure to welcome so many long time book club members to my house on the evening of January 22 to discuss Madeleine Albright's memoir. We started off on other topics: the recent wave of robberies in Oakland, brought to the forefront by the fact that Catherine had to miss the meeting as she was detained at work dealing with the aftermath of two home invasions in Piedmont the day before. We also mentioned the presidential inaugural, musing that our outlook would have been very different had Romney and not Obama won the election.

Eventually we moved on to Albright's remarkable life and interesting book. Not all had finished it, and several had to work to get into it at the start, but in general we liked the book and of course it is impossible not to be impressed by her accomplishments, not to mention the sheer volume of travel and work that the role of Secretary of State entails. Although the book is in general broad rather than deep, we agreed that it was probably not possible to do anything else in a book such as this, and felt she did a good job of giving us the back-story for key events, especially those enmeshed in controversy. The book gave us a clearer understanding of the motivation behind policies that we did not always agree with at the time. We pondered how her life might have been different had her husband not left her, and how his connections and financial support shaped her life. All of us enjoyed the humorous notes, which gave us some insights into her personality although we did not feel we got to know her well. It is a book that stays with you because so many of the problems she was working on in office are still in the news today.

An additional pleasure at the meeting was that Karen's mother had sent along a wonderful book about Madeleine Albright's pins titled, Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box, which we passed around and admired (some of us rather covetously).