Living in DC, I meet so many different women. Some are professionals, and others are stay-at-home moms. I admire these women. I see myself in them. I am both a mother and an attorney working in downtown DC. One of my close friends shared her journey with me from the time she moved to DC until five years later, with one of her children graduating from high school. Unfortunately, she and her husband divorced. She intended to move to DC and start a new life for her and her family, but her life took a different turn. I found her story so compelling.

In Washington Wife II, the author is focused on Louise. Louise has had enough. She has tried everything. She tried to be the supportive wife, great neighbor, and perfect Washington wife. And now she has to find another address and maybe even some new friends. Her helpful friend, Anne, the successful lawyer and contractor of the CIA, has run out of options, time, and resources for Louise. Annes time has been spread thin because of the dangerous criminal that her company has been busy trying to bring to justice. Austin is helping as much as he can. Louise will have to bring all resources and all the connected Washington wives together to help. She can only rely on Anne if it becomes necessary. Both Anne and Louise find a few new friends and a few new enemies. It could become very dangerous for these Washington wives.

Mary Ball was born in Virginia in 1706. She married Augustin Washington, a widower with two sons, in 1730. Her oldest child, George Washington, was born in Westmoreland County. The family then moved to and estate in Stafford County, Virginia, when her other two sons and three daughters were born. She died at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1789.

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 façe. 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.

Traditional portrayals of politicians in antebellum Washington, D.C., describe a violent and divisive society, full of angry debates and violent duels, a microcosm of the building animosity throughout the country. Yet, in Washington Brotherhood, Rachel Shelden paints a more nuanced portrait of Washington as a less fractious city with a vibrant social and cultural life. Politicians from different parties and sections of the country interacted in a variety of day-to-day activities outside traditional political spaces and came to know one another on a personal level. Shelden shows that this engagement by figures such as Stephen Douglas, John Crittenden, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Stephens had important consequences for how lawmakers dealt with the sectional disputes that bedeviled the country during the 1840s and 1850s--particularly disputes involving slavery in the territories. Shelden uses primary documents--from housing records to personal diaries--to reveal the ways in which this political sociability influenced how laws were made in the antebellum era. Ultimately, this Washington "bubble" explains why so many of these men were unprepared for secession and war when the winter of 1860-61 arrived.

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