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THE SPEECHWRITER

A BRIEF EDUCATION IN POLITICS

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

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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