Going Rogue: An American Life Sarah Palin

Posted on | November 24, 2009 | 2 Comments

Due for release in December, but Guardian books seem to already be selling it!

behind the scenes, from CSMonitor

The ink incident. About the time she became a teenager, Sarah Heath (her maiden name) was sitting at the dinner table when her father noticed some ink marks on her hand. Her father – a teacher who at the time was also her basketball coach – surmised that his daughter had mooningly written some boy’s name on the back of her hand.

“You have a choice between boys and sports,” he told her. “You’re at the age where I start losing my good athletes because they start liking boys. You can’t have both.”

Palin stood up, went over to the sink, and washed the name off her hand. For her, it was fine for her father to set such high expectations, she writes in “Going Rogue.”

Breaker, breaker, it’s your boyfriend.” Her father’s stern tutelage notwithstanding, a few years later the young Sarah became enamored of Todd Palin, a quiet boy who’d moved to town to play basketball at the high school. He drove Sarah to practice. He owned both a car and a truck. He was polite. Her family approved. All was great.

But with four teenagers in the Heath household, calls to members of the opposite sex on their single phone line were banned. Sarah and Todd found a way around this when they discovered that if they stood on their respective back porches they could talk to each other on the VHF radios he used on his fishing boat in the summer.

They talked that way for months – until they discovered that the commercial trucks barreling through towns could hear them.

The most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the news media, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million advance for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for disparaging comments by John McCain’s aides about her after the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunderheaded — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insisted, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

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