The Speechwriter will make you like Mark Sanford, and hate the author

Barton Swaim, whose short, acid memoir, The Speechwriter, has been riding a wave of adulation from reviewers in the New York Times and the Washington Post, would have benefited from that advice before going to work for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford in 2007. Instead, he had to figure it out along the way, and that chronicle of discovery and disappointment is the narrative arc of the book. But it also makes the book unrewarding and unpleasant, and the gushing reviews surprising.