rogue (r¯og), n: An elephant that has separated from a herd and roams about alone,in which state it is very savage.—Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary
After three years of research, bestselling journalist Joe McGinniss presents his already controversial and much anticipated investigative chronicle of Sarah Palin as an individual, politician, and cultural phenomenon.
In his critically acclaimed book about Alaska, Going to Extremes, the fledgling state itself was Joe McGinniss’s subject. Although he didn’t hesitate to reveal the many flaws and contradictions behind its “last frontier” image, McGinniss fell in love with the land and its people. More than three decades later, he returned to Alaska in search of its most famous resident, Sarah Palin.
On Election Day 2008, McGinniss began his on-the-ground reporting that culminated, famously, in his moving next door to Sarah Palin in spring 2010. THE ROGUE is the eagerly awaited result of his research and writing: a startling study of the illusion and reality of Sarah Palin—and a probing look at the Alaska and the America that produced her. Sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, always provocative and illuminating, THE ROGUE answers the questions “Who is she, really?,” “How did she happen?,” and “Will she ever go away?”
In all of his books, McGinniss has scrutinized the mysterious space between image and reality—how that space is created, negotiated, and/or manipulated. Now, with The Rogue, McGinniss combines his deep appreciation of the place Sarah Palin comes from with his uncanny ability to penetrate the façades of people in public life. The result is an extraordinary double narrative that alternately traces Palin’s curious rise to political prominence and worldwide celebrity status and recounts the author’s day-to-day experiences as he uncovers the messy reality beneath the glossy Palin myth.
Readers will find THE ROGUE at once bitingly insightful, hilarious, and profoundly ominous in what it reveals—not just about the dark underpinnings of a potential presidential nominee but also in regard to the huge numbers of Americans who passionately support her.
The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Plunging into a subject without wearing blinders is an engaging investigative method, and McGinniss, as he always manages to do, pushes the story forward in momentum while continuing to link new material with bits of information from past experiences and interviews. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
About the Author
Joe McGinniss is the author of eleven previous books, including The Selling of the President, Going to Extremes, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith, Cruel Doubt, and The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. He lives in Massachusetts with the writer and editor Nancy Doherty.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
275 of 339 people found the following review helpful
By Annette
Format:Hardcover
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/
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/
140 of 173 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I almost did not buy the book because of the negative publicity regarding the lack of sources. When I did read it, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many people spoke on the record. Who knows what the truth is? McGinniss has plenty of documentation for his his unflattering version of the facts. I really do not think Palin wants to take this to court.
266 of 334 people found the following review helpful
By Krotos
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Amazon Library
If you're a Sarah fan, you will NOT like this book. I like McGinnis's writing style; have enjoyed his books for years. Read more
Published 13 days ago by KConnelly
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah
Now THIS is a a scary person. Her relationship with the truth and with reality are fascinating. She just makes it up as she goes along. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Stevie851
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't waste your time!
First off, let me start by saying that I am not a "Sarah Palin lover". But I live in Alaska and know her daughters, and I can say she is a devoted Christian, mother, and wife. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Sarah
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Rogue
It was OK. I am not a big fan of Sarah Palin, but do like Joe McGinniss. I heard that she had a problem when he was writting this book. Read more
Published 2 months ago by James A. Nicholson
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who is the real Sarah Palin?
After reading "Going rogue" by Sarah Palin, i cam across Joe McGinnis's book "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Jean-Paul A. HELDT
4.0 out of 5 stars
Train Wreck in slow motion
I can't stand the woman so I don't know why I read about her. Joe Mc Ginniss is probably spot on. I gave comments on Huffington Post that were not mean to the extent that others... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Robert Redinger
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a family!
Have ANY of ever heard of you such a high profile politician & family with such twisted, demented morals as The Palin Family? Read more
Published 3 months ago by Fred C. Bunch
3.0 out of 5 stars
Somewhat worthwhile
This novel is a total hatchet job but was interesting to read nonetheless. It is overly critical of a number of people and incidents, but it is meant to be entertaining.
Published 4 months ago by S. Taylor
3.0 out of 5 stars
Reality vs perception
The information in the book was about what I expected, having heard an interview with Joe McGinniss. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Geoff Young
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good read, a good laugh or two, a good author
First, let me get my biases out of the way and say that I'm a Joe McGinniss fan. I like his books, by and large, although I do not always agree with his conclusions (I'm still not... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Miz T
