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player ready...Reputation: Portraits in Power
By Marjorie Williams
Edited by Timothy Noah
PublicAffairs, 287 pages, $26.95
“Its credit system is proximity; its currency, information,” wrote Marjorie Williams, in 1993. She was writing about our nation’s capital. Williams, a much admired Washington-based journalist, died of liver cancer in 2005 but was fortunate enough to have a husband who published a collection of her work titled “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” the following year.
This new collection is a set of personal portraits — for instance, “The Story of a Good Girl” (Anna Quindlen) and “The Story of a Bad Boy” (Lee Atwater) — and it makes us long for her powers of observation, reminds us that a writer can make us see the world in an entirely new way if we only gaze from different angles.
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