The whole sordid tale of Elizabeth Tudor and her cousin, Mary Stuart (or Stewart, if you prefer) is one that most folks generally know.

I did. Generally, that is. I knew female leaders in the mid-16^th Century (or really, in the mid 20^th) were rare and that this pair drew attention even in their own day.

But what Dunn has accomplished here is to match their lives, retelling their lives and choices in relation to one another.

Mary was the one named Queen of Scots at just six days old. Her fiancé was the future French King, and she was raised as her husband’s playmate in the French Court, where she was manipulated from Day One by questionable advisers. From this childhood, she is bound to Catholicsm, Europe’s royal families and her own pampered worldview.

By contrast, Elizabeth was born a bastard in the eyes of Catholics and had been disinherited by her teens. Especially after she survived the Tower of London, and with two siblings with more claim to the throne, she alone came to realize the power of those being governered to support to reject the monarchy.

From this, Mary became the impulsive ideologue, given to flowery and passionate words and actions that spring from her certainty in all she did.

Elizabeth was the cooler head, so given to weighing every scenario that she appeared at times to take no action at all.

And yet, when the ax finally falls on Mary’s head, it is from a clear decision from Elizabeth. It is that move that finally puts Elizabeth ahead in history and eventually moves the crown to Mary’s son, James I, who has taken sides with his aunt.

So it is that a man finally unites the kingdoms but only after the women do all the work.

Book 32
The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís – Mark Kurlansky
The nations of the Caribbean have long been colonies of the United States, both officially and in reality. Nowhere is this more apparent today than in baseball.

Kurlansky points out that by 2005, a full quarter of minor league baseball players come from the Dominican Republic. And the historical town of San Pedro de Macorís is the island’s baseball belt: the city sent 79 players to the mayor leagues between 1962 and 2008. All of New York City sent just 129 in that same time.

How a city devoted to poetry, then sugar became the city of shortstops (think Tony Fernandez) and second basemen (Rico Carty and Sammy Sosa) is intrinsically linked to the region, to the United States and to the behemoth of Major League Baseball.

And far more compelling than the success stories like Alfonso Soriano are the tales of the 97 percent of players who never make it to the show, and the big money. Baseball is game and an endeavor. But for these young players, it’s one of the only ways out of one of the worst economies in our hemisphere.

Book 33
It's What's Inside the Lines That Counts: Baseball Stars of the 1970s and 1980s Talk About the Game They Loved – Fay Vincent

Continuing on the baseball kick, I zipped through his interview-history project by former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent. The premise is simple: track down former players, managers, an umpire and even the guy who started the players union, to talk about their time and experience with the game.

Marvin Miller, the labor leader, sticks out. Not only did he help win free agency for the players, he has a better grasp than many of the owners on how competitive and driven professional athletes really are.

Unfortunately, his and other interviews are a bit too rambling to get a quick feel for those players. Vincent appears to have simply transcribed interviews with limited editing, giving far too much space to clichés and wandering trains of thought. It reads fast, but it doesn’t much stick. Perhaps oral histories should be left to the spoken, not written, word.

The Benefits of Middle-Age Fitness

Americans are living longer, with our average life expectancy now surpassing 78 years, up from less than 74 years in 1980. But we are not necessarily living better. The incidence of a variety of chronic diseases, like diabetes and heart disease, has also been growing dramatically, particularly among people who are not yet elderly.

The convergence of those two developments has led to what some researchers have identified as a “lengthening of morbidity.” That means we are spending more years living with chronic disease and ill health — not the outcome that most of us would hope for from a prolonged life span.

But a notable new study published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that a little advance planning could change that prospect. Being or becoming fit in middle age, the study found, even if you haven’t previously bothered with exercise, appears to reshape the landscape of aging.

For the study, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Cooper Institute in Dallas gathered medical records for 18,670 middle-aged men and women who’d visited the Cooper Clinic (the medical arm of the Cooper Institute) for a checkup beginning in 1970.

The 18,670 men and women, with an average age of 49, were healthy and free of chronic diseases at their first checkup, when they all took a treadmill test to determine their aerobic fitness. Based on the results of this initial fitness test, the researchers divided the group into five fitness categories, with the bulk of the people residing, like most Americans, in the least-fit section.

Then, in a first-of-its-kind data comparison, the researchers checked the same individuals’ Medicare claim records (with permission) from 1999 through 2009, by which time most of the participants were in their 70s or 80s.

What they found was that those adults who had been the least fit at the time of their middle-age checkup also were the most likely to have developed any of eight serious or chronic conditions early in the aging process. These include heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and colon or lung cancer.

The adults who’d been the most fit in their 40s and 50s often developed many of the same conditions, but notably their maladies appeared significantly later in life than for the less fit. Typically, the most aerobically fit people lived with chronic illnesses in the final five years of their lives, instead of the final 10, 15 or even 20 years.

While this finding might not seem, on its face, altogether positive — the fit and the unfit alike generally became infirm at some point, the Medicare records showed — the results should be viewed as encouraging, says Dr. Benjamin Willis, a staff epidemiologist at the Cooper Institute who led the study. “I’m 58, and for me, the results were a big relief,” Dr. Willis said.

That’s because, he points out, the results show, in essence, that being physically fit “compresses the time” that someone is likely to spend being debilitated during old age, leaving the earlier post-retirement years free of serious illness and, at least potentially, imbued with a finer quality of life.

Interestingly, the effects of fitness in this study statistically were greater in terms of delaying illness than in prolonging life. While those in the fittest group did tend to live longer than the least fit, perhaps more important was the fact that they were even more likely to live well during more of their older years.

Of course, aging is a complicated process and extremely individualized, with the onset or absence of illness representing only one element in quality of life after age 65 or so. But it is a big element, says Dr. Jarett Berry, an assistant professor of internal medicine at U.T. Southwestern and an author of the study. “And since it appears to be associated with midlife fitness, it is amenable to change,” he continues.

While aerobic fitness is partly determined by genetics, and to that extent, the luck of the universe, much of a person’s fitness, especially by middle age, depends on physical activity, Dr. Berry says.

So, exercising during midlife, especially if you haven’t been, can pay enormous later-life benefits, he says. “Our study suggests that someone in midlife who moves from the least fit to the second-to-the-least-fit category of fitness gets more benefit,” in terms of staving off chronic diseases, than someone who moves to the highest fitness grouping from the second-highest.

And moving out of that least-fit category requires, he says, “only a small dose of exercise,” like 20 or 30 minutes of walking on most days of the week.

“You don’t have to become an athlete,” says Dr. Willis, who himself has little time for exercise but tries to fit in a daily walk. “Just getting up off the couch is key.”

I’m a newcomer to Cooper, an author and critic whose loving embrace of all things on the edge has given him a slavish cult following.
Alas, I am not among them. In this collection of essays – some quaintly nostalgic 90s pieces such as a candid interview with then-up-and-comer Keanu Reeves – Cooper proves to be bold and peckish in his views.
Sadly, he also can come across as dull and repetitive – never good for a writer whose sentences and references clearly show he could do so much more.
At his best, Cooper is sharp and incisive, peeling away layers of people or interpreting everything from young artists’ work to the subtext of drug use on early MTV.
At his worst, he is a very precise note-taker, shoveling the likes of a list of zines from the ‘80s as creative work and penning rambling complaints that, frankly, arouse the gripes of very few.
The writing itself is generally lyrical and clear. It’s just that his efforts for duality – comparing the likes of pop culture against more high-brow work – try far too hard sometimes. Cooper himself admits to being reluctant to see himself as a better writer of non-fiction. A better critic would have followed his gut.

This book was from that same batch as the other paperback, from a person about three times removed.
At least in this case, I’d heard of the author (and the cat), and I’d read a few of her novels before. In fact, one of my late aunts thought these mysteries, featuring a former postmaster who solves crimes with the help of her critters, were just a hoot.
I wouldn’t go that far, but the writing was a lot better than the most recent Brown book I read. As she’s aged, Brown has taken to non-sequitur political rants under the guise of character development. Some of it especially turns me off, like when she insists “the media” only focus on death and murder.
(Note to Ms. Brown: As an author, you are creating a medium, namely a book, that is, alas, focused on death and murder. Railing against the media for this focus, then, is a bit meta. That is all).
Anyway, minus some strangely clipped dialogue and (for her) gentle rants, this is a pretty good book. The mystery of the murders will surprise some, especially since Brown never fully addresses a red herring that may leave some scratching their heads long after they put the book down.
And maybe now that I have a cat, as a lifelong dog person I can better understand the asides from the four-legged characters. Maybe.

Book 30
Size 12 is Not Fat – Meg Cabot

It’s that time of year again, when authors from all over descend on my little town as part of the largest independent book festival in the country.
I went to see Baratune Thurston the first morning, his satire and background having drawn me in several years ago. CG, meanwhile, went to see Meg Cabot, who is turns out is (according to CG) very Tina Fey-esque in her humor and manner.
That’s why CG bought this, a Cabot mystery featuring an overly earnest former teen pop star who has recently gained some weight, shed a fiancé and lost her mother and manager, who absconded with her earnings.
The story itself isn’t a typical mystery. But Cabot has a casual way of writing that makes Heather Wells come alive, even if not all of her personality traits seem to match up. For someone who we learn is constantly thinking about food, Heather seems a likely candidate for transferring her obsessions to wondering why female students in the dorm – ahem, resident hall – where she now works are dying in such dramatic ways. But she seriously thinks about Doritos when she is tracking a murderer?
It’s clearly not very literary, or even well plotted. I figured out the killer about a quarter of the way through. But it’s an easy, pleasant read and that can sometimes be enough.

A forensic anthropologist Reichs is an unlikely hit author, even if the science behind that gig is a perfect fit for some pretty good mysteries/thrillers.

By now, most folks know that Reichs is behind the series of Bones books and TV show, about her alter-ego Dr. Temperance Brennan. This is one of those first novels, which exposes both Reichs’ forensic expertise and her impressive plotting. Seriously, I’ve read books by “official” authors who can’t tie together plot lines and move a story along as well as Reichs does. Kudos, doctor.

Reichs is coming back to town early next month for the Decatur Book Festival. I’ll be there to listen to her ideas and quips. And yes, I’m bringing this hardback for her to sign. Good stuff.

Book 26
The Miracle at Speedy Motors – Alexander McCall Smith

I had heard of, but never read, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series. And when I say I’d heard of it, I knew it existed, but I had no idea it was based in Botswana and written by a Scotsman who used to live in Africa.

This book revolves around the heroine, Precious Mma Makutsi.

All the while, Mma Ramotswe is slowly learning that her husband, the owner of the motorway, has fallen under the sway of a hinky doctor who has pledged to cure their daughter’s paralysis.

None of this falls under the usual mystery category, but the story still allows for a charming tale of appreciating the small miracles before us every day.