Full name: The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate

Author: Marjorie Williams Year: 2005 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, Essays, Politics, Memoirs Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9781586483630 1586483633

Marjorie Williams knew Washington from top to bottom. Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on the capital's most powerful figures. Her accounts of playing ping-pong with Richard Darman, of Barbara Bush's stepmother quaking with fear at the mere thought of angering the First Lady, and of Bill Clinton angrily telling Al Gore why he failed to win the presidency -- to name just three treasures collected here -- open a window on a seldom-glimpsed human reality behind Washington's determinedly blank façade. Williams also penned a weekly column for the Post's op-ed page and epistolary book reviews for the online magazine Slate. Her essays for these and other publications tackled subjects ranging from politics to parenthood. During the last years of her life, she wrote about her own mortality as she battled liver cancer, using this harrowing experience to illuminate larger points about the nature of power and the randomness of life. Marjorie Williams was a woman in a man's town, an outsider reporting on the political elite. She was, like the narrator in Randall Jarrell's classic poem, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," an observer of a strange and exotic culture. This splendid collection -- at once insightful, funny and sad -- digs into the psyche of the nation's capital, revealing not only the hidden selves of the people that run it, but the messy lives that the rest of us lead. Similar books: Political Fictions by Joan Didion The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum How to Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee After Henry by Joan Didion The Wrong Way to Save Your Life by Megan Stielstra My Heart Is an Idiot by Davy Rothbart Giving Good Weight by John McPhee The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for by Alice Walker Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick The Last Empire by Gore Vidal Pieces of the Frame by John McPhee Pops by Michael Chabon Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia J. Williams The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell by W. Kamau Bell Nothing's Sacred by Lewis Black