Candid but not especially compelling.
A former speechwriter for an ex–South Carolina governor offers a glimpse into what it really meant to be a “fashioner of words” for a self-obsessed politician who fell from grace.
When Swaim went to work as Mark Sanford’s speechwriter, he was a naïve English doctorate with romantic notions of what his job would entail. He believed that his position would not only provide him with all the “gratification of being a writer,” but also give him “political power, or at least a veneer of it.” Within just a few weeks, though, the author went from feeling that he was indispensable to realizing that he was working for a hypercontrolling narcissist with a tin ear for language. Swaim transcribed Sanford’s often inarticulate letters to learn the governor’s syntax and the “ungainly phrases” that characterized it. In between Sanford’s half-comic, half-terrifying “bouts of rage,” Swaim also learned that in the political world, what mattered more than clarity and grammatical precision was the ability to sound “consequential” to both constituents and the media. The author soon became just another bureaucrat with no special investment in either the success of Sanford’s administration or in his political ambitions, which at one point included the presidency. Only when the governor admitted to both an affair with an Argentine woman and to using state funds to visit her did Swaim realize just how much he had invested in his job. With melancholy bitterness, he writes, “everything we’d worked for was discredited.” The author briefly and incompletely sketches out the story of the colorful Sanford and his political fall. The narrative is strongest in its quiet reflection of the end of Swaim’s political innocence. As he came to realize, democracy—with its promise of liberty and justice for all—is ultimately based on rhetorical manipulation of the masses.
Candid but not especially compelling.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6992-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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