Product Description

On September 3, 2008 Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gave a speech at the Republican National Convention that electrified the nation and instantly made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

As chief executive of America′s largest state, she had built a record as a reformer who cast aside politics-as-usual and pushed through changes other politicians only talked about: Energy independence. Ethics reform. And the biggest private sector infrastructure project in U.S. history. While revitalizing public school funding and ensuring the state met its responsibilities to seniors and Alaska Native populations, Palin also beat the political "good ol′ boys club" at their own game and brought Big Oil to heel.

Like her GOP running mate, John McCain, Palin wasn′t a packaged and over-produced "candidate." She was a Main Street American woman: a working mom, wife of a blue collar union man, and mother of five children, the eldest of whom was serving his country in a yearlong deployment in Iraq and the youngest, an infant with special needs. Palin′s hometown story touched a populist nerve, rallying hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans to the GOP ticket.

But as the campaign unfolded, Palin became a lightning rod for both praise and criticism. Supporters called her "refreshing," "honest," a kitchen-table public servant they felt would fight for their interests. Opponents derided her as a wide-eyed Pollyanna unprepared for national leadership. But none of them knew the real Sarah Palin.

In this eagerly anticipated memoir, Palin paints an intimate portrait of growing up in the wilds of Alaska; meeting her lifelong love; her decision to enter politics; the importance of faith and family; and the unique joys and trials of life as a high-profile working mother. She also opens up for the first time about the 2008 presidential race, providing a rare, mom′s-eye view of high-stakes national politics - from patriots dedicated to "Country First" to slick politicos bent on winning at any cost.

Going Rogue traces one ordinary citizen′s extraordinary journey, and imparts Palin′s vision of a way forward for America and her unfailing hope in the greatest nation on earth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-17
• Released on: 2009-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061939891
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Matthew Continetti Like a lot of people, as soon as I got my copy of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue," I immediately thought of the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss is known as the father of critical reception theory. According to Jauss, every book is read in a social context. In his view, the reader's attitudes, beliefs, values and judgments are just as important as the text. Sometimes more. Palin probably didn't set out to write a book that tested Jauss's thesis. But, in so many ways, the reaction to "Going Rogue" is as interesting as its content. Palin's memoir is everything you'd expect from a politician who has no intention of leaving the national scene. With the aid of Lynn Vincent as her ghostwriter, she tells homespun stories, cracks a few jokes, provides juicy campaign gossip and lets the reader know where she stands on issues such as the right to life, government taxes and spending, health care and climate change. Like a good Republican, she invokes Ronald Reagan's name at every opportunity. The book is so packed with facts, history and encomiums about her state, she's practically a one-woman Alaska Division of Tourism: "We have the highest number of pilots per capita in the United States." Palin tells her side of a story that's usually told by her opponents. It's the tale of how she rose from small-town mayor to the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee to her current status as global celebrity and one of the most polarizing figures in American politics. She writes in the warm, casual, occasionally corny voice that has made her so lovable to some and revolting to others. I'll go out on a limb and predict that if you like Palin, you'll like "Going Rogue" -- and if you don't like Palin, well, I hear the new Stephen King is pretty good. What's unusual is that "Going Rogue" has ignited such a media firestorm. After all, politicians write books like this all the time. Nobody pays any attention. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Bill Frist, John Ashcroft, Mike Huckabee, Joe Biden, Henry Waxman -- and many, many more -- have all put pen to paper (often with help from collaborators) in order to record the authorized accounts of their political and personal lives. But they don't often go on "Oprah." For the typical pol, a book serves as the news peg for a media tour. He gets to go on "The Daily Show," comment on public affairs and remind his constituents and campaign donors that his opinions matter. Then the book disappears. The pol returns to other business. Palin is different. Her book has become the occasion to re-litigate the 2008 presidential campaign. All the raw cultural battles over abortion, feminism and populism that erupted when she strode into the limelight have sprung up again. All the stand-up comics who had a blast last year reducing this conservative reformer to a cartoon are ridiculing her once more. The press and established powers in Washington consistently hold Palin to a higher standard. The AP assigned a team of 11 reporters to "fact-check" Palin's book. I don't remember Harry Reid's "The Good Fight" getting that treatment, but then, hardly anybody remembers "The Good Fight." Among the AP's discoveries was the fact that -- I am not making this up -- Palin is ambitious. One critic described Palin as being "ungrateful" to the McCain campaign. Why? Because in her book Palin returns fire on the anonymous campaign strategists who called her a "diva" and "whackjob" to eager reporters. What was she supposed to do? Play the role of the orphan Oliver Twist and ask, "Please, sir, I want some more"? Through no fault of her own, Sarah Palin has become a sort of political lens, refracting the different ways conservatives and liberals see the world. To her supporters, she is, as she puts it, a "common-sense conservative" who isn't afraid to make moral judgments. To her detractors, she's a moronic zealot who has no place in American public life. The two interpretations are concrete. "Going Rogue" won't do much to change any minds. But for what it reveals about our current political culture, Hans Robert Jauss would say it can't be beat. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Sarah Palin grew up in Alaska towns, from Skagway to Wasilla to Anchorage, while her dad taught science and coached high school sports. She and her future husband, Todd Palin, graduated from Wasilla High School in 1982, and she went on to earn her college degree from the School of Journalism at the University of Idaho. Palin served two terms on the Wasilla City Council, then two terms as the city's mayor and manager, and was elected by her peers as president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors. She then chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. Palin was elected Alaska's youngest, and first female, governor, serving from 2006 to 2009. While serving her state she was tapped as Senator John McCain's running mate in 2008, becoming the first female Republican vice presidential candidate in our nation's history.

The Palins reside in Wasilla with their five children, including a son in the U.S. Army, and one grandson. They enjoy an extended family throughout Alaska and the Lower 48.

Customer Reviews

Ain't afraid of no Vietcong king
There are many kinds of truth. There are truths based on facts, truths based on faith, and truths based on something that sounds as if it should be true (truthiness). Then there's the kind of truth we find in Sarah's book: stories and concepts that become truths simply because she states them. She's a lot like our Lord and Savior, Glen Beck, in that respect.

Sometimes, she states truths that would be considered ludicrous if uttered by someone else. Her claim that the McCain campaign forced her to spend $150,000 in RNC funds to dress her family in designer clothes is one example of that. Although it might be easier to believe that she acted like a trailer park Zsa Zsa who'd found a credit card left behind at a possum feed, she blames McCain staffers. That's good enough for us, because we have faith; we want to believe her truths.

But the book isn't perfect. As much as I enjoyed the few short paragraphs in which Mrs Palin laid out her policy objectives, she could have condensed it all into one sentence: "I'm going to grab an Oxo Good Grips Stainless Serving Spatula and go all mavericky on your non-white, non-Christian and non-heterosexual butts."

The book also fails to expose Mrs. Palin's intellectual brilliance and keen grasp of foreign policy issues. Why wasn't the text of her recent speech in Hong Kong included? Although it remains secret, it's rumored that she viciously rebuked the Vietcong king for his assault on the Empire State Building. That's a speech we've been waiting for nearly 75 years to hear. It's big news and should have been included.

As you read other reviews of this book, please remember that Mrs. Palin has many enemies who are eager to pan her work. The Palin family's most potent nemesis, Levi's johnston, is no dpubt fully erect and ready to spew globs of misfortune upon them for a third time. And reason-adoring intellectuals are certain to point out that an interview on Good Morning Topeka doesn't qualify as a policy summit in the Far East.

But a few bad reviews won't stop her. She's seen much worse from her kitchen window. It can't be pleasant to gaze upon Antichristograd every morning as you brew your coffee.

My review isn't complete, but I think I'll quit anyway, because writing reviews, like governing, is just too darned hard to finish.

A British perspective on a controversial American
Prior to reading this book, I knew little about either Sarah Palin or Alaska and I was interested to learn more about both, especially the book's author. Although famous in America, Sarah Palin could go just about anywhere in Britain completely anonymously as long as she didn't meet any Americans along the way. Frankly, Brits normally only take any notice of American politicians if they become president. There are exceptions such as Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, but they are rare. Contrast the number of reviews of this book posted in Amazon USA with the number posted in Amazon UK for confirmation of the lack of British interest.

I realized early on in this book that I was going to enjoy reading it because Mrs Palin's story is both interesting and well-written. She makes summer in Alaska sound wonderful, although acknowledging that the winters are long and harsh. She discusses many aspects of her life and it is clear that she has strong views on a number of issues.

Although not directly relevant to her political career, perhaps the most intriguing question about her beliefs concerns her stance on the origin of species. At first glance, Mrs Palin appears to be a full-blooded creationist, but she denies this. Apparently, she accepts what she calls microevolution, in which species change and evolve over time, but not that people are related to apes or monkeys. Her stance is interesting, but I prefer to accept Darwin's theory, despite the proof of it still being incomplete.

Not having studied the American political scene closely, I'll leave others to judge the accuracy of the main story, but the politics as described here is explosive stuff. Corruption in Alaska, tales of in-fighting within the Republican party and dirty tricks played by some Democrats - all rather sad, but I'll say straight away that similar things happen elsewhere in the world including Britain. Hey, the summer of 2009 was dominated by the expenses scandal at Westminster, while all British political parties of any significance have had their internal fights at one time or another, in between playing dirty tricks on each other. So in one form or another, most of the political stuff here doesn't surprise me, but some of it is shocking nevertheless.

An unconventional politician in many ways, Mrs Palin nevertheless appears to have brought about significant changes in a number of areas in her home state of Alaska, which may seem to many people (especially in my country) like a frozen wasteland, but which is rich in natural resources and occupies a vast land area, approximately equivalent to France, Spain, Italy and the UK combined. So being governor of Alaska is not equivalent to running a small local council in Britain even though it is sparsely populated (fewer people live there than in the county of Leicestershire in which I live). I suspect that the position of state governor may be equivalent to being leader of the Welsh assembly. The biggest Alaskan story by far in my adult lifetime was the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which Mrs Palin covers briefly; she later had plenty of political fights with the oil companies (including BP as well as ExxonMobil and others) in her time as state governor.

Mrs Palin has drawn plenty of criticism from a variety of sources and uses the opportunity that this book affords to hit back at those critics, often explaining how things have been distorted by the media. Having had my own relatively minor experience of being in British national newspapers, I have sympathy with victims of media distortion, so I don't blame Mrs Palin for hitting back via this book, but I can see that others will react badly. At least my story was a one-day wonder with no lasting consequences, but things are different for those who go into politics, sport or showbiz.

Mrs Palin clearly isn't impressed by the way the Republican presidential campaign was handled, and clearly feels that she wasn't able to contribute effectively to the campaign, but the aftermath was even worse. While some Republicans were happy to cast her as the scapegoat, some Democrats launched a sustained campaign against her that exploited freedom of information laws. Ultimately, this created problems for the legislative process as well as personal difficulties for the Palin family, all described in detail, causing Mrs Palin to decide that she had to quit as governor with a year still to run, even though she was never found guilty of anything. As she acknowledges, that decision to quit may kill her political career, but Mrs Palin says that she did what she felt was right for Alaska. Inevitably in such situations, people will believe whatever they choose to.

I expect Mrs Palin will return to public life in some capacity eventually. That might be as a presidential candidate, but it might alternatively be as champion of a cause dear to her heart. Her vice-presidential campaign generated enormous hope among disabled people, while her love of Alaska makes her passionate about environmental issues. So there's two obvious issues, but I'm sure there are others.

Would I vote for Mrs Palin, given the chance? I don't know because I'd need to know more about issues not discussed in this book, but I'd like the option.

I can see why this book - and the author - are so controversial. Fans of Mrs Palin will love this book, while critics will be furious. Both are likely to have their opinions reinforced by reading this book. Coming from a position of ignorance, I'll just say that I found this book to be compulsive reading.

A talk with Sarah Palin
This book is excellent. It feels after reading it like you sat down and had a talk with Sarah about her experience. The style is very down home and easy to read. I think most will really enjoy this book.

If you read this book you will find the true Sarah Palin, not the one manufactured by the campaign nor the one frothing liberals love to talk about. Over half of the book is about who she really is, her upbringing, significant experiences, values and such. You see things that don't come out in other sources or what was mentioned in the campaign. Through that story you will see Sarah in a new light.

I found Sarah very inspiring for many different reasons. One big thing is how you see Sarah is ordinary. Nowadays the political elite, from both parties seem like they live in a different world. They all have Ivory educations, didn't work a day in the their life, and have millions and millions in coffers to ensure they stay the political elite.

Sarah is different than all of that. She has kids, struggles to pay bills, and is involved in her kids schools like millions of others across the country. Here was a concerned citizen who stood up and got involved instead of just talking about things. Her idealism and personality propelled her up the chain. Her campaigns were all grass roots and run on shoe string budgets. Sarah went for what is right in AK, not what got her ahead. People forget while Governor she went after her own party and the big bad oil companies. This is from a Republican?

Sarah's description of her VP campaign time was very enlightening. She doesn't preach to much, just relates this story or that story. Through that you get a very clear picture of the campaign. You can see exactly why McCain lost. His people weren't about ideas but were about some abstract formula only they understood. You can understand why the Republicans are in such bad shape through that. From the book I think half of McCain's staff were working there because they couldn't get a Democrat staff job. Sarah's popularity comes entirely from her motivation from the ideas, not from consultant packages. The fact that Sarah was able to operate at the national level should inspire us all. Ideas and common people still matter.

The last part of the book is full of Sarah's description of life after the campaign. You can see what is wrong with the country through that. Sarah talks about the harassment from the liberals of the country. They all were enraged over the fact that a conservative commoner might challenge them. They flooded her and the AK government with every kind of tactic you could think of in order to grind her down. It is no wonder we get who we get for national leadership when you learn about these conditions.

I do think most will love the book. It really gives you a good insight to the woman and events around Sarah Palin.

Sarah