Recent Wesleyan grad Beck Dorey-Stein swore she would spend no more than three months in Washington, D.C., a place she calls “an ego swamp of a city.” Then she lands a job as a White House stenographer, a position she didn’t even realize existed.

From the Corner of the Oval is Dorey-Stein’s effervescent memoir that recounts spending five wide-eyed years traveling the world on Air Force One, producing transcripts of President Barack Obama’s press conferences and speeches. She joins a team of D.C. insiders who hopscotch the globe, from Senegal to Tanzania to Stonehenge, all in service to their country and to the man they call POTUS.

“The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse,” Dorey-Stein writes. “It is degrading and embarrassing and awkward when a twenty-two-year-old advance person scolds you for disappearing to the bathroom, and when you’re so hungry you eat three bags of stale cookies in front of a vanful of trigger-happy photographers. Civility takes a backseat to survival as you chug water, throw elbows and down half a bottle of Advil. You work through the pain to keep up with the action. Ballets are full of bloody slippers.”

Yet the few chosen to serve the president also form intense bonds, and they get a front seat to history. Dorey-Stein and her colleagues bear witness to the White House response to the tragedy of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. She forms a tight band of friends within “the Bubble”—her name for the president’s cliquish traveling entourage—and she begins an ill-fated romance with a magnetic yet noncommittal senior staffer.

Dorey-Stein offers a generous, vivid portrait of what it’s like to work at the epicenter of power when your job is to stay out of the spotlight. She navigates heartbreak, career indecision and friendship like virtually every 20-something. But unlike other young women, she does it all in the shadow of the White House.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One late morning in August, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, in their living room, gasping for breath. In a surreal flurry, Santlofer frantically dials 911 while urging his wife to hold on. Soon he’s standing against the living room wall watching his wife die, even as paramedics try to save her.

Joy’s death leaves her husband bereft, and Santlofer struggles to live with his grief, a process he details in his heart-rending, poignant memoir, The Widower’s Notebook.

Following Joy’s death, Santlofer spends many sleepless nights not only reliving her death but also recalling the many tender, angry, sad and joyous moments of more than 40 years of married life. On one of those sleepless nights, he writes with fits and starts in a notebook, trying to bring some peace to his restless mind. He also starts to draw pictures of Joy and their daughter, Dorie. “Drawing,” he writes, “has made it possible for me to stay close to Joy when she is no longer here . . . grief is chaotic; art is order.” In the pages of his notebook, Santlofer reflects on the importance of paying attention to the pain of grief: “Better to have painful memories than no memories at all.” He meditates on the many things he misses about Joy, as well as the stupid things that smart people say to grieving friends. Even after he releases Joy’s ashes, Santlofer shares the raggedness of his still-raw emotions, admitting that he’ll never stop crying.

Santlofer’s honesty, his focus on the moments that remind him of Joy and their life together, and his beautifully crafted, tender prose make for heartbreaking yet page-turning reading.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“It started,” Peter Mayle begins, “with a break in the weather.” After two weeks of a rainy Mediterranean vacation, Mayle and his wife, Jennie, set out to look for sun and explore Provence on their way home to England. They quickly fell in love with the beautiful region of southeastern France.

After the couple uprooted their lives and moved to Provence, Mayle wrote his beloved 1991 memoir, A Year in Provence. My Twenty-Five Years in Provence is the last volume of travel writing from Mayle, who died in France in January 2018, and it is a bittersweet pleasure.

It’s hard to believe that the initial print run of A Year in Provence was only 3,000 copies, as the book quickly became a sensation. For many readers, the aspiring novelist (his fiction never attained the popularity of his accounts of a delectable café lunch) put Provence on the map.

In this final memoir, Mayle returns to the beginning, recounting the couple’s early days house-hunting, learning the language and falling in love with the culture. This is France, so of course food and wine play a large part in his writing. But while Mayle can pen a mouthwatering description of bouillabaisse, what has always drawn readers to his writing are his loving portraits of people, community and the Provençal way of life.

“Lunch is taken very seriously in Provence,” Mayle discovered early on. So it’s fitting that as he makes his way home from the village market, basket piled high with warm bread, fragrant cheese, cherries, grapes and fresh eggs, Mayle’s last words to us are, “I must go. Lunch is calling.”

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.