220 of 269 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Geoffrrey Dunn (Author) says it best, September 27, 2011
Five days before a literary embargo theoretically prohibited any reviews from appearing in the mainstream media, the New York Times delivered what was effectively a journalistic hit (executed by Janet Maslin) on bestselling author Joe McGinniss and his long-awaited book-length profile of Alaska's former governor, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin.
Since then, the review has gone viral, in both the rightwing blogosphere and, even more troubling, in the mainstream media, and has been used as a political weapon--there is no other word for it--by everyone from Todd Palin to Andrew Breitbart in attacking McGinniss and his book. Maslin's initial catchphrases, most notably her references to "caustic, unsubstantiated gossip" and "unnamed sources," swiftly became the dominant meme surrounding the book long before others even had a chance to read it. Indeed several mainstream reporters cited the Maslin review without having read the book itself. Only yesterday the Huffington Post shamefully linked to Maslin's review when it fallaciously reported that The Rogue claims Palin had "slept with a string of black men." It does not.
As reviews go, it is a bloody hatchet job from beginning to end, rendered with a dull and ragged blade. From the very first paragraph, Maslin hacks away at McGinniss, whose collected oeuvre stretches back to his 1969 bestseller The Selling of the President and the classic Going to Extremes (1980), which deftly chronicled the changing nature of the Last Frontier under the economic, political and cultural onslaught brought about by the 1970s oil boom and the completion of the Alaska pipeline. I was--and remain--an admirer of both works.
I should also acknowledge that I am the author of an earlier book on the former Alaska governor, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, published by St. Martin's in May, and which I suppose in some people's eyes would make me something of a competitor with McGinniss, though I never looked at it that way. I sensed at the outset that our books would be very different--and they are, told through very different eyes and voices, and with an entirely different focus--although they come to startlingly similar conclusions about Ms. Palin, both as a human being and as a political figure. While I have never met McGinniss personally, we were introduced by email last year through mutual friends in Alaska and we occasionally communicated (or, more accurately, commiserated) about the poisonous ordeal of covering Palin. But I had not seen a single word of the McGinniss book until I read the first "installment" in Doonesbury, which featured excerpts from the book (all by "named" sources, incidentally), and then received a review copy that arrived in the mail later that week.
I was nearly three-quarters of the way through it by the time that Maslin's review was first posted on the Times web site. I was immediately appalled by its intellectual dishonesty, its distorted portrait of the book, and its unbridled demonization of McGinniss. She calls the book "dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access." Really? Then why, one must ask, has the book caused such a ruckus? Are there reports on the Internet, for instance, of Palin's mass firing of people of color during her first weeks as Governor of Alaska or personal accounts of her dominionist religious beliefs? Is there a full-scale work that combines the elegance and depth of McGinniss' reporting into a composite narrative? I think not. Indeed, the power of The Rogue is that the whole of its devastating narrative is greater than the sum of its parts.
Moreover, roughly nine months after the assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords--over whose congressional district Palin had placed crosshair images on her SarahPAC website--there's not a single mention by Maslin of Palin's troubling behavior and commentary, both before and after the carnage that left six innocent bystanders dead and another 13 wounded; nor is there a single reference to her many demagogic (and unsubstantiated) claims regarding President Obama, with whom she is strangely obsessed (her charges of "death panels" and "palling around with terrorists" come immediately to mind). Nor does Maslin mention Palin's troubling behavior on the campaign trail, with her ramped up rhetoric that lead respected Congressmember John Lewis to condemn Palin for "sowing the seeds of hatred and division" throughout the country. All of this is apparently forgiven, or conveniently forgotten, by Maslin, whose Sarah Palin is--once again--a victim. Poor Sarah. Poor, poor Sarah Palin.
II.
Early on in her review, Maslin gives the game away. She clearly has taken sides against McGinniss regarding his moving next door to his subject on the banks of Lake Lucille. Heaven forbid! After mocking a reference that McGinniss makes to some nesting grebes, Maslin declares: "Tweets emanated from the Palin place, too. But they were the kind that Mr. McGinniss could have monitored from his home in Massachusetts."
Seriously? A book about Palin could have been written in Massachusetts without ever stepping foot in Wasilla or the Mat-Su Valley? Is she kidding us? That's exactly what John McCain thought regarding his shoddy vetting of Palin. And it's what softball journalists who have glorified Palin's record as governor of Alaska have claimed as well. It's a con job from beginning to end.
Sarah Palin is clearly the product of two deep strains in American politics: One emanates from Alaska, where isolation and corruption define its political culture; the other is the dark underbelly of the American body politic that has produced demagogues from Huey P. Long to Joe McCarthy to, I dare say, Sarah Palin. From the friendly confines of Maslin's home in uppity, lily-white Pleansantville, New York, she apparently can see neither.
http://my.firedoglake.com/geoffreydunn/2011/09/27/blood-in-the-snow-maslin%E2%80%99s-nyt-review-of-the-rogue-is-intellectually-dishonest/
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223 of 275 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful look into Sarah Palin's disturbing personality, September 28, 2011
The advance publicity has made it out to seem that "The Rogue" is little more than a tabloidish exposé of Sarah Palin's sex life, but the salacious revelations about her youthful one-night stands comprise only a small part of a thoughtful and thoroughly-researched character study. This is probably McGinniss's finest work since "Fatal Vision," and it's strongly recommended for anyone who wants to see the unpleasant reality beneath Palin's folksy public persona.
McGinniss moved into the house next door to the Palins' compound in Wasilla, Alaska, in the spring of 2010. For the next several months, he interviewed Palin's neighbors, former friends, political colleagues, and ordinary Alaskans while dealing with a torrent of abuse and threats against himself and his family provoked by Palin and by right-wing media figures such as Glenn Beck. "The Rogue" alternates the story of Palin's adult life with McGinniss's own sometimes harrowing experience of researching it. While McGinniss never obtained an interview with Palin herself, he talked to enough people close to her to develop a compelling -- and frightening -- portrait of her true character.
The picture that emerges is of an ice-cold, greedy, amoral, and utterly self-absorbed woman who is unable to develop normal relationships even with her own husband and children and who has spent her life using and discarding everyone around her in her pursuit of fame, power, and money. It is not evident that Palin has ever truly cared about anybody other than herself. It was particularly sad to read about her ignored daughters going dirty and malnourished while Palin spent her days lying in her bedroom, only to be pulled out as props at political rallies whenever Palin wanted to present herself to adoring fans as an all-American "hockey mom." Her relationship with Todd Palin is less like that of husband and wife than of two business partners who can barely stand each other, and while Todd is not a sympathetic figure either, one can almost feel sorry for his plight at being trapped in an apparently loveless marriage.
Even more disturbing than Palin's personal life are the details about her alliances with extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist groups that openly advocate tearing up the Constitution and imposing a religious dictatorship on America. Palin has, understandably, played down this aspect of her beliefs, but McGinniss makes it clear that she has been in the orbit of the Reconstructionist/Dominionist movement since her days as mayor of Wasilla. Unlike so much else about her, her commitment to this anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, neo-fascist branch of evangelical Christianity is completely sincere. She genuinely believes that God has called her to lead the nation and purge it of anti-Christian influences. And what is scary is that so many other people genuinely believe this about her too.
This book solidified my feeling that the Republican pseudo-populist uprising represented by Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, et al., and bankrolled by shadowy right-wing billionaires and corporate front groups is the most dangerous domestic threat this country has faced since the Civil War. Palin's star seems to be currently waning, but she has bounced back from irrelevance many times before. Don't count her out.
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