Book News
“Rogue” behavior.
Readers can be forgiven for feeling a bit confused. Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” was published Tuesday, right? Yes. So what are all these other Palin books that are garnering so much attention?
Released earlier this month is “Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar,” by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe. The authors are reporters who were “embedded” on the Palin vice presidential campaign trail.
Their book covers Palin through her resignation from Alaska’s governorship, and they say it portrays her as neither “a heroic everywoman or ridiculous dolt.”
Also just out is “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star,” by Matthew Continetti, associate editor of The Weekly Standard magazine. The book’s subtitle probably tells you all you need to know about the book’s political orientation.
On the same day that Palin’s memoir hit bookstores, readers were able to pick up “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare,” a collection of essays pulled together by two senior editors at Nation magazine. Here, again, the subtitle tells you all you need to know about the book’s angle.
To make this all the more confusing, however, is that another “Going Rouge” book is also out. It’s a satirical coloring book by Julie Sigwart and Michael Stinson, who identify themselves as “longtime liberal activists.”
First Lines
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, where there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was dead as a door-nail.
Independent BestSellers
Fiction
1. A Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
2. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown
3. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
4. Last Night in Twisted River, by John Irving
5. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Nonfiction
1. Superfreakonomics, by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
2. What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell
3. Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom
4. Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer
5. True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy
