A coffee table book about brooches, but don’t let that frivolous description stop you. Madeleine Albright, first woman secretary of state, accessorized with pins all her life, but it wasn’t until Saddam Hussein called her “an unparalleled serpent” in a poem he allegedly wrote himself that she retaliated by wearing a pin in the shape of a gold snake coiled around a branch, a tiny diamond hanging from its mouth, to their next meeting. “…leaving the meeting,” she writes
I encountered a member of the UN press corps who was familiar with the poem; she asked why I had chosen to wear that particular pin. As the television cameras zoomed in on the brooch, I smiled and said that it was just my way of sending a message…Before long, and without intending it, I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal. Former President George H.W. Bush had been known for saying, “Read my lips.” I began urging colleagues and reporters to “Read my pins.”
This book is a lavishly illustrated collection of Albright’s pins strung together with a series of remembrances of the times she wore them. She wore a blue diamante dove, head down, when addressing the downing of two American planes by Cuba. She wore an elaborate bee pin to meetings with Yasir Arafat. “My pin,” she writes, “reflected my mood.” She wore a gold angel pin during public remarks on the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. She frequently matched her pins to the country she was visiting, as in wearing her zebra pins to meet with Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
At the end there is even a Pindex, which is where I went to find the page number for the photograph of the miniature silver and amber saxophone, trumpet, electric guitar, cello and piano, which she wore at the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz event honoring Stevie Wonder. She writes
It’s hard to tell from the picture, but I managed to get an entire jazz band onto my jacket.
Her collection is certainly eclectic, some pins encrusted with gemstones in the fashion of Fabergé, others looking like they came out of a Crackerjack box. Some of them are fabulous, like the green dragon and sword from Turkey, and all of them are charming, including her favorite, a heart-shaped clay pin created by her five-year old daughter Katie and given to Albright on Valentine’s Day. “I have often worn it since,” Albright writes.
The pin reflects one of the indispensable purposes of jewelry: to bind families together and connect one generation to the next.”
And you will love the ants scampering around on the very last page. Delightful.
