Bestsellers on The Huffington Post

Palin's Book Sparks Attacks On Vegetarian Critic

2009-12-27T10:24:46Z

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has never made any bones, if you will, about her culinary preferences. She's a carnivore, a hunter and proud of both.

So it's not really a surprise that her book, "Going Rogue," published today, extols the virtues of eating meat.

Dr. Judith Rich: Have Yourself A Merry Little Chrismahanukwanzaadan

2009-12-25T09:31:02Z

OK, diversity fans and PC police, here's the ultimate holiday greeting: you combine the world's four main holidays celebrated at year's end: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Ramadan, and you get "Christmahanukwanzaadan".

What's not to love about this greeting? It's inclusive! Depending upon which holiday you celebrate, you might choose to juxtapose the sequence. Perhaps you prefer "Ramahanukwanzaachris". Or maybe "Hanuchrismaramakwan" rolls off your tongue more easily. Repeat after me 3 times a fast as you can......Hanuchrismaramakwan, Hanuchrismaramakwan, Hanuchrismaramakwan.

It really doesn't matter which holiday is mentioned first. It's all in there. What matters (or not, depending on your point of view) is that everyone's preference is honored. Or you could just take the easy PC way out and wish people "Happy Holidays" like most people do these days.

But isn't it kind of fun to color outside the lines sometimes and tweak people's minds just a teensy bit and come up with the unexpected? Or maybe tweak them a LOT?! Try out this alternative holiday greeting the next time you're about to wish someone "Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays" and see what kind of reaction you get. I'm betting you get a smile and that's worth the price of admission isn't it?

Speaking of tweaking the mind and getting a smile, I've been tweaking my own mind and smiling a lot this holiday season, all due to the "gift-free" vow I took at Thanksgiving.
I can't help but feel just a teensy bit smug as I cruise past the freeway exit to the Bay Street shopping center and see cars backed up for blocks, inching their way onto surface streets and vying for those ever dwindling spots in the parking garage.

I have not missed the shopping part of the holiday season one iota. Nor will I miss the soon to be "exchange season" about to begin on Dec. 26th. Instead, I will be on the northern California coast at one of my favorite spots on the planet, Sea Ranch, enjoying a few days of holiday merry-making with family and friends.

This is what it's all about for me. The older I become, the more happy and satisfied I am with simple pleasures. Give me a raging fire, good food and conversation to match, maybe add a glass of champagne and I am a happy camper.

This year, I notice that I'm happy to leave behind the stress of wanting to have the holidays meet some standard I adopted from who-knows-where and from who-knows-who. I know I'm not alone in this. Many of you have written about your own version of re-writing the holiday scripts you inherited from your families of origin.

You know the ones: where you gather with people you see once a year, sit around a big table and gorge lots of food, all the while trying to find a way to connect with that one family member who's views about life and politics are diametrically opposed to yours.

You do your best to be polite and not say anything to rile up Uncle Hank, while you listen to him drone on and on about things in which you have zero interest. You paste a generic courtesy smile on your face and utter strategically timed "ah ha's" every so often to make it appear you're engaged. Uncle Hank doesn't even notice that you're not listening because he's so self absorbed, he's really engaged in a monologue and having an ever so good time communing with himself.

If you want to tweak Uncle Hank just a tad and get his attention, wish him a Happy Ramachrismakwanzaakuh and wait for him to react. He might even inquire what in the world you're talking about! This could open a myriad of possibilities for launching into a cultural discourse on the world's great religions.

Or it could end up being a very short conversation before Uncle Hank moves on to investigate the plum pudding, in which case your best bet is to join him and imbibe in some yourself. And while the two of you are munching away, mention Sarah Palin and watch Uncle Hank light up.

In this season where Going Rogue is either going vogue for some or going bogus for others, try a little roguishness yourself. Break the rules. Who's rules are you following anyway? Chances are, if you're anything like 99% of the rest of the people on the planet, you're following rules you never formally signed on to. They came pre-installed and you and I just marched in step until we made them our own.

So go ahead, break a few this Chrismahanzaakwanadan ( See, it has an infinite number of variations. You could amuse yourself for hours with this.) and stir things up at your holiday celebration. I'd love to hear how you'll do that.

Looking ahead, lest we overlook the obvious, we about to launch ourselves into a brand new decade in a little over a week. A new chapter begins! A clean slate awaits. What are creating for your life starting in 2010? What new territory invites you? We've much inquiry to do on this one, so stay tuned and let's get busy creating the extraordinary.

Please drop by the comment section and share your "shake up the holiday plans" and plans for the new year. Do come and visit me on my personal blog and web site at Rx For The Soul. Or send me an email: judith (at) judithrich.com. Become A Fan if you'd like to receive automatic updates here and wake up your Facebook friends by posting this on your FB page.

Thanks for the memories we've shared in 2009. Frankly, I'm not sad to see it go. It's been a challenging year for most of us. Still and all, I'm grateful for the many blessings I've received this year not the least of which is you and your loyal readership here on the Huffington Post.

I'll be away until after the New Year, so let me take this chance to wish you all a joyous and abundant Sanah Jadidah (Iraq), Saale Nao Mubbarak (Afgani), Xin Nian Kuai Le (Chinese)
L'Shannah Tovah (Hebrew), S Novim Godom (Russian), Heri Za Mwaka Mpya (Swahili) New Year.

May the new decade greet you with creative opportunities to be more of who you truly are!

Blessings on the path,
Judith

Sarah Palin: Myth And Mythmaking

2009-12-24T16:24:49Z

"Sarah and Her Tribe", Jonathan Raban
New York Review of Books, Forthcoming in the January 14, 2010 issue

"Going Rogue: An American Life"
by Sarah Palin
Harper, 413 pp., $28.99

"Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar"
by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe
PublicAffairs, 301 pp., $26.95

When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

There's a moment of near rapture in the video of Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul on September 3, 2008. It begins in the eleventh minute, after her Westbrook Pegler quote ("We grow good people in our small towns...") and before her "lipstick" quip about hockey moms and pit bulls. Following a nervous start, she is now entirely at ease in front of the biggest crowd of her speaking life, and riding high on the chants of "Sarah!" "USA!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" Her smile looks ecstatic, as she allows herself a snuffling chuckle at the acerbity of her own wit, then shows off her repertoire of little nods of self-approbation, complicit left-eye winks from behind her glasses, and lips smugly pursed to signal that an unanswerable point has just been made. When the camera cuts to the crowd, face after face is a joyful mirror image of Palin's own, as if transfigured by a shared triumph. (Striking exceptions among the faces include those of Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, and Cindy McCain, all of whom register a cautious agnosticism in the presence of the epiphany.) In "Going Rogue", Palin and her ghost, Lynn Vincent, write of the speech, "By God's grace I was having a ball."

In contrast to Barack Obama, who maintained a detachment verging on aloofness from his most fervent and adulatory campaign crowds, Palin achieved an extraordinary at-oneness with her supporters; not least, perhaps, because she appeared to be such an enthralled fan of her own performances. She managed to endow her threadbare homilies about free enterprise, tax cuts, patriotism, and the evil of government spending with the novelty of her own sudden, fresh-faced presence on the national scene. Most of all, she seemed to embody in her person and her life story the accumulated grievances of the heartland and the West: the resentment in the countryside and the exurbs against the liberal tyranny of the big cities; the antipathy of those she calls "real Americans" toward the "East Coast elites"; the surly resistance of states' rights proponents to "the Feds."

Her nasal voice, pitched in the upper register, with the upsy-downsy, singsong delivery of a kindergarten teacher, became, rather improbably, a great electoral asset. Her diction and accent were shaped more by class than region, and spiced with faux-genteel cuss words like "dang," "heck," "darn," "geez," "bullcrap," and "bass-ackwards." It was a voice unspoiled by overmuch formal education and boldly unafraid of truisms and clichés; a perfect foil for Obama's polished law-school eloquence. In the narrative of the McCain campaign, she was the exemplary real American, Obama the phony one, and when people are now interviewed in the interminable lines for her book signings, by far their most common remark about her is "She's real."

Alaska, the particular reality from which Palin hails, is so little known by most Americans that she was able to freely mythicize her state as the utopian last refuge of the "hard work ethic," "unpretentious living," and proud self-sufficiency. Her anti-tax rhetoric (private citizens spend their money more wisely than government does) and disdain for "federal dollars" were unembarrassed by the fact that Alaska tops the tables of both per capita federal expenditure, on which one in three jobs in the state depends, and congressional earmarks, or "pork." So, too, she mythicized the straggling eyesore of Wasilla (described by a current councilwoman there as "like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other") as the bucolic small town of sentimental American memory. Listening to Palin talk about it, one was invited to inspect not the string of oceanic parking lots attached to Fred Meyer, Lowe's, Target, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot, or the town's reputation among state troopers as the crystal meth capital of Alaska, but, rather, the imaginary barber shop, drugstore soda fountain, antique church, and raised boardwalks, seen in the rosy light of an Indian summer evening.

To audiences struggling to keep their heads above water through a deepening recession, her Alaska de l'esprit, this land of boundless natural resources and minimal government and taxation, "microcosm of America" as she liked to say, sounded a fine place to which to escape from the exigencies of living in the real United States in 2008. When talking to people who talk and think as she does, Palin has an exceptionally canny political instinct for connecting with her own kind. She turned her campaign rallies into giant family picnics, at which the assembled thousands, striking for their physical resemblance to one another, basked in having their own family catchphrases, like "politics as usual," returned to them in magnified form by the monitor screens and loudspeakers. Safely within her tribe, Palin speaks fluently, with warmth and humor,[1] though grammatical logic tends to evade her; it's away from the tribe, talking, for instance, with Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, and other members of what she now calls the "lamestream media," that she dissolves into flustered babble.

"Going Rogue" is about further cementing her connection to the tribe. A book that begins with Governor Palin visiting the Alaska Right to Life booth at the 2008 state fair ("With their passion and sincerity, the ladies typified the difference between principles and politics") clearly isn't aiming to pander to liberal trespassers among its readers. Her encounter with the sincere and passionate ladies, and the jangling false antithesis between "principles" and "politics," which goes little further than the fact that both words begin with a p, sound the opening notes of Palin's dominant theme, as she markets her brand of "Commonsense Conservatism."

Commonsense Conservatism hinges on the not-so-tacit assumption that the average, hardworking churchgoer, like the ladies at the booth, equipped with the fundamental, God-given ability to distinguish right from wrong, is in a better position to judge, on "principle," the merits of an economic policy or the deployment of American troops abroad than "the 'experts'"--a term here unfailingly placed between derisive quotation marks. Desiccated expertise, of the kind possessed by economists, environmental scientists, and overinformed reporters from the lamestream media, clouds good judgment; Palin's life, by contrast, is presented as one of passion, sincerity, and principle. Going Rogue, in other words, is a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance.

Much of the book is given over to establishing what Palin shares in common with the "patriotic, good-hearted Americans" who've been crowding the malls to await the arrival of her tour bus, so one learns more than one would ideally like about her habits as a consumer. Her preferred fashion label is Carharrt, the manufacturer of outdoor work clothes; she says she shops at Costco and clips coupons. "We buy diapers in bulk and generic peanut butter." She dislikes "fancy food," "fancy clothes," and "fancy jewelry." When she and Todd Palin "eloped" to Palmer (which is all of eleven miles distant from Wasilla) to get married, they celebrated with a wedding dinner at "the Wendy's drive-thru." Later, they "bought a $35 wedding band from a street vendor in Hawaii, and it still works!" "My family is frugal," Palin remarks, rather unnecessarily.

Meat is what she likes to consume most, though not rare, or even pink, meat (which might strike a too-fancy note with her target demographic):

I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals--right next to the mashed potatoes....

People outside Alaska are often clueless about our reliance on natural food sources. (You know you're an Alaskan when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat-processing plant.)

Her sarcophagous appetite for flesh and slaughter goes hand in hand with her scorn for vegetarians--more, it seems, because of their presumed social class and education than because of the food on their plates. An old enemy in Wasilla (the book is full of them) is described as a "Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad who wore her gray hair long and flowing and with a flower behind one ear." Palin's speechwriter on the McCain campaign, Matthew Scully, is also the author of an admired book on animal rights, Dominion. He becomes "a bunny-hugging vegan and gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semitruck to save a squirrel" and "the classic absentminded professor." Though his speeches were "like poetry," it required a real, meat-eating, normal American to give them substance.

In a welcome moment of shading and contrast, Palin the consumer finds space to mention the fact that she drives a black VW Jetta, which seems an odd choice of car for an all-American patriot, since US Jettas are imported from the Volkswagen assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico.

"Everything I ever needed to know, I learned on the basketball court," Palin says, reprising a sentence she first wrote in an Op-Ed piece for the Anchorage Daily News in April 2004, before ghostwriters entered her life. "I loved competition." On one hand, she paints herself as the average mom, a "Main Streeter," as she described herself in her campaign debate with Joe Biden; on the other, driven by her "gift" of "determination and resolve," she's a born winner, but only of reassuringly average trophies, which are lined up in the book as on the family mantelpiece.

There's the medal she won as a ten-year-old from the VFW for her poem about Betsy Ross (alas, not reprinted here), along with the sashes from the Miss Wasilla contest ("I won every segment of the competition, even Miss Congeniality") and her place as second runner-up to Miss Alaska in the state final. "Every year in school I ran for something in student government--vice president, treasurer, something." Her many exploits in track and field culminate in the high school basketball championship game between the Wasilla Warriors, captained by Palin with a badly sprained ankle, and the Service Cougars of Anchorage. "I'd never worked so hard for anything in my life, because I'd never wanted anything so badly." Small town played big city. Small town won. "That victory changed my life."

Her father, Chuck Heath, hunter, taxidermist, elementary school science teacher, and sports coach, loomed imposingly over her childhood, and clearly inspired her egregious appetite to compete in, and to win, every contest that came her way:

My siblings all won many more sports awards than I, as I wasn't equipped with anything close to their natural talent. But I once overheard Dad say to another coach that he'd never had an athlete work harder. Overhearing those words was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

No wonder she found political elections irresistible, and basketball, with its multiple opportunities for tactical cheating, in the way of well-executed pushes, jersey-pullings, bumpings, and "flops," supplies a fitting analogy for how the bright, intensely willful, energetic, but academically mediocre housewife and salmon-fisher gamed her way from the Wasilla city council to the gubernatorial mansion in Juneau. Palin showed her form in her first big race, in 1996, when she challenged the three-term incumbent mayor of the town, John Stein, who seems not to have known what hit him. With the backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and the hunting interest, she campaigned on the nonmayoral issues of abortion and gun-ownership. It was put about that the Steins were living in sin: they produced their marriage certificate. It was also put about that Stein, a lapsed Lutheran, was Jewish. In 2008, he told William Yardley of The New York Times:

Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, "Whoa." But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I'm not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: "We will have our first Christian mayor." I thought, Holy cow, what's happening here?

In "Going Rogue", Stein is described as "relatively new to the community." "He wasn't a born-here, raised-here, gonna-be-buried-here type of hometown guy." Those darned wandering Jews.

Palin won by 651 votes to Stein's 440. Installed in the mayor's office, she sacked the town planner, police chief, museum director, and librarian (who was later reinstalled after a public protest), and set about her mission of deregulating Wasilla. Business inventory and personal property taxes were abolished; land was rezoned from residential to commercial to meet the needs of incoming big-box chain stores and fast-food outlets, and from single-family to multi-family to encourage speculative condo development; Palin cast the tie-breaking vote in council to stop the city adopting a building code. She held out the invitation to prospective investors in Wasilla to build what they liked, where they liked, out of any materials and to whatever standards that they chose. The long, unlovely, centerless ribbon of commerce that stretches along Alaska's Highway 3, punctuated by the signage of Subway, I-Hop, Burger King, Arby's, KFC, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and the like, is a monument to Palin's cherished vision of the free-market, free-enterprise society. As she boasts--justifiably--of her time in Wasilla, "Basically, we'd gotten government out of the way."

After her two terms as mayor were up, she gained statewide recognition in her campaign to become lieutenant governor. What followed was pure basketball--swift, sure, and hard to follow without slow-motion action replays. The US Senate seat vacated by Frank Murkowski when he became governor was in his gift, and Palin, who'd campaigned for him, was one of several people he interviewed for the job before he gave it to his daughter, Lisa. Her pride sorely wounded, Palin nonetheless accepted his consolation prize, the chair of the three-person Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where she sat alongside the chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, and a geologist, Dan Seamount.

Hearing rumors that Ruedrich was leaking confidential state information to a natural gas company, she and a technician hacked into Ruedrich's e-mail account one evening and found evidence that he was conducting Republican Party business from his public office--an offense with which Palin was familiar, since she'd sent out flyers promoting herself from the mayor's office in Wasilla when she was running for lieutenant governor in 2002. She reported Ruedrich to the governor, demanding that he be sacked. When nothing happened, she threatened to resign herself if Ruedrich didn't go. Murkowski reluctantly told Ruedrich to step down or be dismissed. Two months later, in January 2004, Palin herself resigned from the commission, telling the press that she'd been gagged by the governor from speaking in public about Ruedrich's ethical violations.

In "Going Rogue", this episode is held up as the supreme example of Palin's courage, independence, sincerity, and passion. "As I typed out the [letter to Murkowski], I thought, This is it. I'm taking on the party and putting it in writing. My career is over. Well, if I die, I die. " It also illustrates her acute political gumption, her keen ear for the mood of the moment in the strip mall and the stands of the sports arena. Murkowski then was fast turning into Alaska's most unpopular governor on record, and the Alaska Republican Party was deeply implicated in the ongoing federal probe into the VECO Corporation bribery-and-corruption scandal, which would soon send five Republican lawmakers to jail.

At that time, 53 percent of Alaskan voters were registered as independents. By cutting herself loose from the tainted party, to great applause from the local press, Palin perfectly positioned herself to take on Murkowski in the gubernatorial primary of 2006, which she won by an overwhelming majority, as she went on to win the general election in November. It's impossible to know how much conscious calculation went into Palin's extremely smart moves in the Ruedrich affair; probably as much, and as little, as LeBron James needs to make when in possession of the ball.

She takes on the Republican Party again in the 130 pages of "Going Rogue" that describe her national travels as McCain's running mate; not McCain himself, but the functionaries who make up the rules of politics-as-usual, a pampered elite, with their fancy clothes, affected speech, and fancy hotels, led by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. Schmidt is portrayed like a TV villain; a "rotund" smoker who says "fuck"--or rather "f***"--in front of Palin's seven-year-old daughter, and is in the habit of wearing sunglasses in the dead of night, perched on top of his bald skull. Wallace is said to be "outwardly very affectionate," meaning that inwardly she's mean as hell. Palin's campaign chief of staff, Andrew Smith, appears briefly as Schmidt's personal goon, "a tanned, kind of tired-looking guy in a suit" who worked on Wall Street and speaks "in a thick East Coast accent" (enough said). He's never seen again.

This band of thugs, or "paid operatives" from the "professional political caste," acting on orders from an invisible headquarters that Palin isn't permitted to visit, keep her gagged and bound as they attempt to transform this sterling American original into a conventional politician. When she tries to speak to a journalist, "different pairs of hands hustled me into the campaign's Suburban." For hours on end, they torture her with facts on flashcards and prewritten evasive answers to tricky questions. "I couldn't force myself to play it safe and sound like a politician." Leaks from the campaign, about how Palin is a "diva," suffering from "postpartum depression," and "going rogue," find their way into the press, and Palin traces them to Schmidt himself:

Schmidt issued a threat that was veiled enough for deniability but as clear as day if you were on the receiving end: if there were any more leaks critical of anybody in the handling of Sarah Palin, then a lot more negative stuff would be said about Sarah Palin.

Steve Schmidt has called Palin's account of the campaign "total fiction"; Nicolle Wallace says it's "pure fiction." They're on well-trodden ground: in February 1997, three months into Palin's first term as mayor of Wasilla, her local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, carried an editorial that said, "Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth." Fact-checkers from the Associated Press and several tireless bloggers have uncovered scores of inaccuracies and "lies" in "Going Rogue". It's fair to doubt that any line of direct speech in the book was ever uttered by the person to whom it is attributed, and to assume that every factual detail has probably been either invented or twisted out of shape in order to cast Palin in the best possible light. That said, one might also remember the useful distinction made by the Barbizon painter J.F. Millet between the artist who paints directly from life and the artist who paints the same scene from memory: "...the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact."

Surprisingly, perhaps, this seems to be the case with "Going Rogue's" treatment of Palin's vice-presidential run. In "Sarah from Alaska", Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, who were embedded reporters on the Palin campaign for CBS and Fox News, and earn for themselves a couple of paragraphs of abuse in "Going Rogue", which adds to their credibility, largely confirm Palin's story in its broad outline and coloring. Their Schmidt and Wallace are characters nearly identical to her Schmidt and Wallace. Read side by side, the two books work like a stereoscope through which to watch the steadily darkening atmosphere of the campaign, the quarantining of Palin from the press, the infighting, the stream of leaks, and the vain attempts to educate the candidate in current affairs. Conroy and Walshe report that when Schmidt gave her a copy of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, she obediently carried the book around in her purse but chose to read "People", "Us", and "Runner's World".

By both accounts, Palin was treated with extraordinary condescension from the start; more as a dim and wayward eighth-grader than as a sitting governor, putative vice-president, and the speaker whose rallies drew ten and twenty times the crowds that showed up to hear John McCain. Her admirers will see in these chapters a brutal crash course in the chicanery, pettiness, and sexism of national politics, from which their heroine emerges annealed, but with her spirit unbroken, as "real" and fiercely principled as on the day she took McCain's phone call on her BlackBerry at the Alaska state fair.

Her detractors rejoiced when, on July 3, 2009, at a hastily assembled press conference outside her Wasilla house, Palin announced that she was going to resign as governor, in a wild and rambling speech, delivered from notes at breakneck speed, about lame ducks, dead fish, selfless troops, basketball, quitters, General MacArthur, the politics of personal destruction, ethics complaints, destiny, the media, putting first things first, and how America was looking north to the future. She appeared to have lost her wits.

Now she's back: reviving the book business in provincial towns from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Richland, Washington; working on her keynote address to the Tea Party movement's national convention, to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, in February; tweeting daily, sometimes hourly, to her tribal followers about the state of the nation; and everywhere parading her Down's syndrome son, Trig, along with her most photogenic daughter, Piper, as living testaments to herself as the model pro-life mother. What she's running for is not yet clear, but she's evidently running for something.

"Going Rogue" is stuffed with dubious quotations from Famous Authors, among them one often attributed, but never reliably sourced, to Pascal: "the God-shaped vacuum in every human heart." Unfortunately, there does seem to be a Palin-shaped vacuum in the heart of the American electorate, and it's not hard to see why. After the ritual brandishing of the flag and her shout-outs to her fellow Christian fundamentalists, Palin's core message is, as it always has been, about fiscal policy.

In our present neo-Keynesian moment, economics has never seemed more bewildering and arcane, or more the exclusive preserve of hated "experts" from the "East Coast elites." Most people I know, myself included, can't readily follow the algebraic equations that explain the "Keynesian multiplier," which, in its turn, is needed to explain TARP and the stimulus package. Belonging to a tribe different from Palin's, I simply take it on trust as a matter of faith that Paul Krugman, in his columns for "The New York Times", is more likely to be right about such things than, say, Lou Dobbs or Senator John Thune, but I share in the general apprehensive fogginess about what's happening.

For Palin, it's simple. The national economy is a straightforward macrocosm of the domestic economy of the average god-fearing family of four. What's good for the family is good for the nation, and vice versa; and the idea that the family should spend its way out of recession is an affront to common sense, conservative or otherwise. On December 3, she tweeted: "Baffling/nonsensical: Obama's talk of yet another debt-ridden 'stimulus' pkg. Fight this 1, America, bc after last 1 unemployment rose, debt grew." Five days later, while Obama was speaking at the Brookings Institution about the economy, Palin wrote, "Quik msg b4 book event: Prez pls pay down massive, obscene U.S debt &/or give 'stimulus' $ back to Americans b4 propose spending more of our $."

Palin's general economic theory, so snugly adapted to Twitter's 140- character limit, carries great weight. At a time when everyone should be clipping coupons, tightening belts, and buying generic peanut butter, Obama (Columbia and Harvard), Larry Summers (MIT and Harvard), Tim Geithner (Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins), and Peter Orszag (Princeton and London School of Economics) are out on a spending spree that is "baffling," "nonsensical," and "obscene." But then what did we expect of the East Coast elites?

Against their transparent profligacy should be set the record of Sarah Palin (University of Idaho, School of Journalism and Mass Media). She made Wasilla hum, while putting an end to personal property taxes. As governor of her state, she taxed "Big Oil" and in 2008 mailed out a check for $3,269, drawn against the Alaska Permanent Fund, to every resident. (This payout shrank to $1,305 in 2009, after Palin quit the governorship.) She not only makes economics perfectly comprehensible at the level of the kitchen table, she makes it work brilliantly in practice.

The rage for Palin's pert simplicities reflects in part the failure of the Obama administration to persuade people of the wisdom and benefits of its far more sophisticated policies. Recently, I came across FDR's fireside chat of April 14, 1938,[2] when, speaking from the bottom of the second trough of the double-dip recession, he delivered a plain and passionate defense of deficit spending; Keynes for the family, and as resonant and topical now as it was seventy years ago. Nothing I've heard from the present administration matches its clarity, and where puzzlement and incomprehension exist, Palin leaps to fill the gap with facile and völkisch answers.

She's much more deeply in touch with her followers than Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, or any other recent candidate who's tried to court the same constituency. (Admittedly, they also lacked her flirty sex appeal.) She has the knack of turning public debate sulfurous with a phrase, as she did last summer with her remark that Democrats want "death panels" in their health plan. She is a catalyst around whom the Tea Party movement[3] is growing alarmingly in size and strength, PAC on PAC, determined to purge the Republican Party of its surviving moderate candidates, like Carly Fiorina and Charlie Crist, as, with Palin's help, it purged Dede Scozzafava in New York's Twenty-third Congressional District. Having hoisted her banner of Commonsense Conservatism, and campaigned across the country by Lear jet and tour bus to promote "Going Rogue", she's unlikely to assuage her compulsion to be a winner merely by selling more books than anyone else during 2009's holiday season. She is the stuff of democratic--with a small d--bad dreams.

Read more from The New York Review of Books.

________

Notes

[1]As she did in her speech at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner at Evansville, Indiana, in April 2009, which can be seen at www.conservatives4palin.com/2009/04/right-to-life-dinner-video-live-feed.html.

[2]See www.mhric.org/fdr/chat12.html.

[3]See Michael Tomasky's essay, "Something New on the Mall," The New York Review, October 22, 2009.

Jonathan Raban's most recent books include Surveillance, Waxwings, and Passage to Juneau. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and teh PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award. He lives in Seattle.

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Loren Singer Dead: "Parallax View" Author Dies At 86

2009-12-24T12:03:18Z

Loren Singer, whose 1970 conspiracy thriller, "The Parallax View," later made into a movie starring Warren Beatty, was one of the first novels to offer a politically paranoid vision of the United States as a country controlled by ruthless technocrats, died on Saturday in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 86 and lived in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his son Andrew.

Best Of The Best Books Lists (PHOTOS, POLL)

2009-12-24T07:00:02Z

Best books, best of the year, best fiction, so many prizes. Who can keep track? We did. We culled them all, prize winners and best of lists from around the country. Send us your picks as well.

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Shannyn Moore: Palin's Enemies List: Alaskan Bloggers

2009-12-23T06:15:17Z

"Call me, STAT! This is Dennis"

Well, that's one way to find out you are on Sarah Palin's enemies list. Yesterday morning, while working on my Shanta Claus projects and prepping for my television show, Dennis Zaki called. He and Jesse Gryphen of the Immoral Minority, had driven to Sarah Palin's Wasilla book signing. Why? Well, it's like storm chasers in Nebraska...only they're train-wreck chasers. Me? Well, I'm busy these days and have had Palin fatigue since before most people have even heard of her.

Don't get me wrong...Thanks Sarah! It's just that I really wasn't interested. Two weeks ago, I had press privileges at her book signing at Elmendorf AFB that was closed to the public. On that day, I was busy figuring out if my hair was oily, normal or dry. Truth be told, I'm just not that into her.

Dennis and I have been friends since the Corrupt Bastards Club Trials. He's one of my favorite Hardy Boys. I met Gryph last year; we fight about half the time...the rest we spend laughing. I'll ask Sarah Palin to sign my copy of Going Rogue after it wins the National Book Award for best fiction...it's richly deserving. Besides, I'm having the "Under the Bus" folks sign it instead; John Bitney, Anne Kilkenny, Andrew Halcro, Lyda Green, Walt Monegan, Trooper Wooten, etc. It's just more honest.

Gryphen and Zaki were booted from the event. My name was on the list to boot if I showed. There's a fourth unknown and unwelcomed guest..who could it be? My guess? Jeanne Devon. Oh, yeah, fellas...the troops are fighting for Palin's right to ban us from a public event!

When the Anchorage Daily News reported on the "Homecoming" event for Palin with the "flocking" of 750 people to the "public" event at the publicly funded Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center with the publicly funded Wasilla Police Officers working security, they made a tiny mention of the bumped bloggers. Nearly 2,000 people showed up for an indoor football game earlier this year at the same complex. Twice as many citizens of Wasilla have become members of the Mat Su Valley Sportsman's Association as showed up for Sarah Palin's glorious homecoming. In "Real America" Palin attracted thousands of teabaggers. In "Real Alaska," the tea bagger capitol and Palin's hometown, there were more people shopping at Wal*Mart.

The ADN also failed to mention that H1N1 virus vaccines were also being administered at the same time as the book signing. Good Lord, if only there were a vaccine for Palin's word salad.

Whoopie Flippin' Doooo! Hell of a homecoming, did she get another crown?

You could find out what Alaskans really think of Sarah coming home judging by the comments on the Anchorage Daily News website...Oh wait...the ADN decided to ban public comments on the article.

Dennis Zaki, Linda Kellen-Biegel, Jeanne Devon and myself all passed the White House Security checks to attend the "closed to the public"troops only speech by President Obama a few weeks ago. The only threat to Sarah Palin by the Alaska Bloggers is the truth. Yes, it's scary.

I guess "Real Alaskans" aren't allowed near an "author" who once asked a librarian if she'd ban books. Oh, the irony...or is it ion-ry...either way, I've been Palibanned!

Best Forgotten Books: Writers Pick Their Favorites

2009-12-22T13:58:56Z

In 1999, the L.A. Times asked dozens of writers to look back at the prior century and share books they considered lost treasures -- books they loved that had slipped out of sight. Although the authors were formidable -- including Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, theorist Susan Sontag and popular novelist John Le Carré -- most of their books remain relatively unknown. Not for want of trying: Editor Robert Giroux worked with E.E. Cummings in the 1950s and tried -- but failed -- to acquire the rights to Cummings' book "The Enormous Room" -- it was his selection for this list.

What follows are lost treasures from 25 writers, as they looked back in 1999.

Best Books To Fix Your Relationship?

2009-12-21T16:04:44Z

When compiling this list of the best relationship books of the past decade, some overriding themes were apparent: Men are sex-obsessed cave men. Women are under the mistaken impression that they're living inside a real-life romantic comedy. But true love and soul mates do exist. It's been a confusing decade for the sexes, but we're confident that we'll figure it all out eventually. Here, a list of the ten most iconic relationship books of the '00s.

Best Books For Getting Rich

2009-12-21T14:53:12Z

The holidays are here, our economy is in a recession and your Christmas shopping needs a bailout.

While we can't dole out federal money to rescue your holiday budget, the Forbes Investor Team can help you find the perfect gift for the savvy investor on your list.

We polled our knowledgeable investor team for their best book suggestions that will make you look smart and keep your investor happy.

Steve Leveen: The Most Important Book Every Man Should Read

2009-12-21T14:24:20Z

Why men should read this book about women, then help make it the most influential book of the decade

At any given moment it's easy to identify successful books. All you need do is scan the bestseller lists or check out the winners of awards. What's hard to identify are the new books that will have lasting influence as agents of change. Who knew that Silent Spring would be celebrated as a game-changing book so many years after its initial publication?

But what if we could have known in 1962, the year of its publication, that Silent Spring would contain a message of change necessary to save our very world? My guess is that we would have acted faster to head off what we're desperately trying to fix today.

So it's important to try to fathom which books will become the most influential books of our time, in order to add force to their nascent power. In this hazardous task, I hazard a prediction: the most influential book of the decade will be Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

Of course I don't know that Half the Sky will be the most influential book, but I believe it should be. And in my own small way, I'm going to help make it so. More important, I invite you--especially if you're a man--to do the same.

It's not (just) about women

The oppression of women is breathtakingly evil, it's frighteningly pervasive in the developing world, and it is alarmingly consequential in its damage--those messages come across vividly in the able hands of authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. They write from first-hand experience as reporters, and also from a deep understanding of their subject through years of research.

Reading their book is like being taken on a frightening but irresistible ride. You don't want to see what you're seeing, but you can't close your eyes either. When the ride is over, they help you understand what you saw and what you can do to make a tangible difference.

The curious thing is that while the book is about the oppression of women, it's not a book about women's problems to be classified under gender studies. Half the Sky is about human rights. The authors argue (successfully, in my opinion) that women's oppression is the human rights issue of our century -- as totalitarianism was of the twentieth century and conventional slavery was of the nineteenth century.

I say "conventional" slavery since it's likely that today's global sex-slave trade is larger in absolute numbers than the transatlantic African slave trade of the nineteenth century.

What's more, helping women not only helps the most humans--women and men--but it is an almost magical leverage point for tackling the dark domes of suffering afflicting the world today. This is especially true when women are given access to education. Two examples: educated women have children later and fewer of them, and they have more opportunities to earn money. Thus the problems of overpopulation and poverty become a bit more surmountable.

The female half of our human capital is desperately needed to understand and effectively fight obstacles facing developing nations, not only overpopulation and poverty but even disease, terrorism and calamitous climate change. The way to hold up our whole sky is to free women to take part in the lifting.

The education of an average white guy

I wouldn't have thought a book about women's oppression would, or should, be the most influential book of our times. I've lived only in the United States, and at 55, I'm smack in the middle of the boomer generation. I've witnessed first hand the progress women have been making. I'm the son of a well-educated professional woman, the brother of strong sisters, and the husband of a beautifully caring and capable woman who founded Levenger as an equal partner with me some 22 years ago.

I've traveled to a good number of countries, including underdeveloped ones, and met professional women in all of them. From my vantage point, things seemed to be working out pretty well for women.

But in truth, I've lived a sheltered life.

My limited education in the oppression women face began 15 years ago when I saw Bandit Queen, a movie from India based on the life of Phoolan Devi and directed by Shekhar Kapur. In 1995 I introduced Kapur at a conference in what was then Bombay, shortly after the movie came out. (He is a celebrity in India, something akin to Robert Redford in the U.S.)

Kapur's movie rocked India with its depiction of sexual brutality as told through the true story of Phoolan Devi, a girl married off at age 9 who fought back with a brutality of her own. The movie deeply affected me, as it did millions of other viewers in India and elsewhere. (The real Devi was imprisoned for murder, pardoned, became a politician, and was assassinated at age 37.)

But then my education slowed to a stop. I started learning again only in the last couple of years, mainly through books that I read about efforts to build libraries around the world. The first book was Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood, and then Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. Both men saw with their own eyes the lack of schools and libraries in remote areas of the world, and learned the powerful leverage to be gained by helping girls. Girls help educate other children at rates far exceeding boys.

Those books led me to Paul Polak's brilliant Out of Poverty, and then Muhammad Yunus's inspiring Creating a World Without Poverty. A common theme in all these books is the leverage to be had by educating girls and financially empowering women, since they pour their knowledge and earnings back into families.

But not until Half the Sky did it come together for me. Kristof's and WuDunn's mix of riveting storytelling and fact-based expository writing, topped off with practical calls to action, is a potent mixture. Their book is engineered to elicit action, and it's working.

Nadereh Chamlou, Senior Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank, praises the book for its call for education and micro-finance, while at the same time cautioning that even more is needed: what she calls

"a paradigm changing shift in society... eliminating any kind of legal and institutional discrimination."

Chamlou says in her region, girls are getting comparable educations to boys, and even more so in college, yet gender roles and laws keep women far from economic and political parity. Here is a link to a video from the World Economic Forum's Gender equality report.

Will Sky's influence grow or die out?

From their pulpit as Pulitzer-winning reporters at The New York Times, Kristof and WuDunn were able to launch their book with force. Oprah has endorsed the authors and their cause, and so has Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet even with these and other media powerhouses behind the cause, it's amazing to me how many of my friends--women and men--have heard of Going Rogue but haven't heard of Half the Sky.

Might this important book be lost in the noise?

Despite every reason why it should influence great action in the years to come, it's quite possible that Half the Sky will not be the agent of change its authors, and so many others, hope. That's why men, in particular, should step up to make sure it does.

Why men?

The men reading this are not the men oppressing women--at least, not in the worst ways. Yet millions of men are. (And so are women, by the way, as so much of the oppression is baked hard into culture.) Consider this from page 61: "Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined." Isn't that stupefying?

Yet we know men are also capable of heroism, self-sacrifice and even, I hesitate to say, chivalry. If I'm not mistaken, men still control most of the power and money in the world. So let's use what we've got--and show what we've got.

We need to cover their backs while women walk through saloon doors, kick some ass, take names, and then walk out. After the dust settles, it would be nice if we picked up the tab at the bar and set the chairs back down on the floor.

Here's the paradigm shift, guys: Seek out women you can help. Then do.

More than just blue sky

Start at home. As the senior Bill Gates says, "...what I find remarkable is that more men around the globe don't realize how much stronger they would be if partnered with a strong woman." That's just what his son has done with his wife in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Next, seek out other women whom you see doing great things wherever they might be. Here are some examples I've seen in the course of running a business.

Laura Roberts-Niner is the CEO of a green chemical company in the U.S. that is growing rapidly by showing how sustainable practices can help big companies make better profits. After reading Half the Sky, she refined her focus even further.

"I loved the last part of the book--about what you can do now. It inspired me to change our charities inside the company to focus on feet-on-the-street organizations overseas, and in this country, that are doing miraculous things for children and women. When women get to the table, things improve--including sustainability."

Roberts-Niner is also launching a website featuring women's charities.

Reading, then doing

Sometimes the women to support work at large public companies, such as Ann Marie Bushell, Group Executive Vice President of R.R. Donnelley.

Bushell personally supports Heifer, which promotes buying cows and other animals that keep on giving to those in the developing world, as well as SIFE, which joins students with pros to bring sustainable business practices to developing countries.

"But Half the Sky stopped me in my tracks," says Bushell. "It's just staggering to me that I can spend $25 for gift wrap, or I can use that same $25 and make a tangible difference in some girl's life--and not even as a gift, but a loan." Bushell went to Kiva to make a micro-loan and then personally recommended Half the Sky to 10 people, "friends, co-workers, even a friendly competitor."

Were any of the 10 people men? I asked.

"Actually, no."

After a moment's hesitation, she added: "I wanted people to act on the book, and there's no way a woman can read this book and not act."

Other women lead nonprofits, such as Darlene Kostrub, CEO of the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County, for which I volunteer.

Gwenny So owns a leather-goods business in China that makes some of the best-constructed leathers I've ever seen, including for Levenger. Most of her executives are women and, like our other Chinese manufacturers, she employs more female workers than males. As Half the Sky points out, with all the very bad parts of communist Chinese history also came very good parts. The freeing of girls to go to school and to participate in the labor force on an equal standing with boys has been a critical component of China's economic miracle.

I'll bet you know women in your world whom you can support so that their influence becomes magnified.

Looking backwards in 2059

Fifty years from now I hope college professors assign an anniversary edition of Half the Sky to their students so that they can see the amazing progress that's been made. I would like to believe that those students will shake their heads and say, "Can you imagine when the world was actually like this?"

But that won't happen by wishing it. It's time for men to open the doors for girls and women, and help make sure it does happen.

Watch this 2:23 minute video called The Girl Effect.

Visit the Half the Sky website.

But most important, read Half the Sky, and see if it doesn't galvanize you. See if it doesn't become one of the books you buy lots of to give away. See if you don't want to discuss it with your buddies. (My all-guys book group is doing that.) See if it doesn't get you to take action.

There are a whole lot of women who could use our help.

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First Day Of Winter: Great Books To Give And To Curl Up With On Winter Solstice (VIDEO)

2009-12-21T11:03:36Z

Winter Solstice, the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year. Looking for a good book to curl up with, or perhaps some great last-minute Christmas gifts? Good Morning America and Parade Magazine have teamed up to offer their picks for the best books of the year, from literary gems to guilty pleasures to surprise hits.

WATCH:

Sunil Adam: Cartoon: Sarah Palin's Book

2009-12-19T15:49:35Z

Best Sarah Palin Spoof Yet: Ru Paul In "Going Vogue"

2009-12-18T18:08:00Z

Amidst all of the spoofs of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue", RuPaul comes out and tops them all. The new promo for RuPaul's show "RuPaul's Drag Race" features a parody of Palin's book cover, this one called "Going Vogue", with RuPaul dressed up as Sarah Palin, creating an awesome and utterly bizarre image.

Laurence Hughes: 10 Best Books That Are Years (PHOTOS, POLL)

2009-12-18T14:12:42Z

Are you sick of 10 Best lists? I am. This time of year there are so many 10 Best Books of the Year lists that we'll have to start ranking them too. Soon we'll need a 10 Best 10 Best Books of the Year List List, just to keep it all straight.

Or we can turn the concept on its head. Instead of focusing on books that were published this year, how about focusing on years that have been published as books? That's what we've done here: Instead of the 10 Best Books of the Year, we present a list of the 10 Best Years That Are Books.

The coming new year is a perfect example. Whatever else you can say about 2010, it's already a book and has been for almost three decades, thanks to Arthur C. Clarke. (Unfortunately, 2010 didn't make our list--more about that below).

A note about our methodology: In our haste to compile our list on a timely basis, we were not able to read all of the books featured here, and those we did get to we faked. Also, readers may note that, as with at least one other recent 10 Best Books list, there are no women represented in our rankings. This should not be construed as evidence of sexist attitudes on our part; it's just that women aren't very good with numbers.

Here, in chronological order, are our choices for the 10 Best Years That Are Books:

Notable Books That Didn't Make the Cut:

April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik.
Winik's book is named for a month rather than a year. We can't imagine what he was thinking.

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan
1969: The Year Everything Changed, by Rob Kirkpatrick
Just when did everything change? One author says 1959, the other 1969. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. We suggest they collaborate on a single volume called 1964: By Then Everything Had Changed or Was Soon Going To.

'78: The Boston Red Sox, A Historic Game, and a Divided City, by Bill Reynolds. Reynolds made the arrogant mistake of failing to include the entire year in his title, and paid the price for his hubris.

2010: Odyssey Two
2061: Odyssey Three
3001: The Final Odyssey
All by Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke's obvious attempt to game our list almost got him dropped from consideration entirely.

2666: A Novel, by Roberto Bolaño. This title doesn't refer to a year. Nice try, Roberto!

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What Not To Read After A Break Up (PHOTOS, POLL)

2009-12-18T07:00:00Z

There's no good time to go through a break up and the holidays are just about the worst. The last thing you want to do is rub salt into a wound by reading the wrong book. So if you're recently out of a relationship, here are some of the best books to save for another time.

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eBook Sales Skyrocket, Book Sales Up In General

2009-12-17T13:45:57Z

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced today in a press release that overall book sales were up in October. The increase is small -- 10.2% for the month and 4.1% for the year -- but mark an overall positive trend. Sales were also up in September, the AAP noted last month. The end of the year has been full of blockbusters, from Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" to Sarah Palin's memoir, and the hype over these books may have contributed to the rising sales.

The most significant area of gains, however, has been in eBooks. The AAP announced that year-to-date eBook sales for October were over $130 million -- a 180.7% increase from 2008. eBook sales now account for 3% of total trade sales, up from 1.13% last year. With the Kindle's rise in popularity and the increasing variety of options for eReaders, it's no surprise that the numbers have jumped so dramatically this year. And as we head into 2010, when eBook sales are sure to continue to rise exponentially, publishers will have to work out exactly how eBooks will fit into their current model.

Publishers have already started to take eBooks more seriously -- over the past week, a battle has been raging over whether publishers or authors should own eBook rights. There has also been much disagreement recently about when eBooks should be released (at the same time as hardcover or between the hardcover and paperback releases), as publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster announced late last month that they were planning on delaying eBook editions of new books.

How should publishers respond to the increase in eBook sales? Are they taking the right steps, or are they making some big mistakes? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Robbie Vorhaus: Tiger, Letterman, Madoff And More: Eight Lessons From The Decade's Biggest Flameouts

2009-12-16T12:32:57Z

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Stephen H. Dinan: Dissolving the Palin Prejudice

2009-12-15T13:10:27Z

Over Thanksgiving, I was hiking with my brother-in-law when he commented that he only knew two kinds of people: those who loved Sarah Palin and those who hated her. Nobody was in the gray zone. While I didn't consider myself a "hater," I also knew that she had triggered intense reactions in me when she joined the Republican ticket. After Obama's victory, the fear of her becoming President subsided along with the negative charge, but I had to confess to a lingering prejudice beneath the surface.

One week later, I bought her autobiography, Going Rogue. Why? To dissolve my own prejudice and to better understand how we as a culture can go beyond the extreme political polarizations that have so paralyzed our country. What I know from years of psychological and spiritual explorations is that whenever we judge or fight something in the world, there is an aspect of ourselves that we are battling against. In creating walls of separation in the world, we reinforce them within ourselves, which is ultimately to our detriment.

I truly believe that everyone has their divine role to play in the world, even those with very different politics, beliefs, and values. While I have held that truth, though, I still had a visceral reaction to Palin - a sure signal that some work remains.

So reading Going Rogue was something of a test for myself - could I find the place of appreciation, respect, and even love for Sarah Palin?

What I found is that it wasn't really that hard, actually, simply by taking the time to meet her on her own turf rather than through sounds bites, spin, and polarized media battles. Reading someone's personal memoir is an intimate journey into their inner sanctum, and I developed a real appreciation for Sarah in reading the book. Aspects of her that seemed coarse, simplistic, or combative during the campaign were revealed to be a product of frontier values and growing up in a culture that is faced with subzero temperatures and constant tests of survival.

Her journey from high school basketball captain to Governor revealed itself as an impressive triumph of hard work, resiliency, and willingness to challenge the status quo. Many of the most caricatured and vilified aspects of her history turned out to be lopsided depictions and sometimes gross misrepresentations.

For example, while her belief in God is deep and sincere, she wasn't fanatical about it or dismissive of others. I found a real appreciation for the spiritual depths she went to when first faced with having a Down's syndrome child. Her ultimate celebration of the beauty and perfection of that child, a child that 90% of people would have aborted according to statistics, was profoundly moving and it led hundreds of thousands of special needs children to feel championed through her campaign.

On other fronts, her pro-development views on energy and oil did not exclude a deep love for the environment and even an appreciation for alternative energy and reducing our carbon footprint. She wrote in moving terms about her husband's indigenous ancestry and connection with the natural world, as well as the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez spill. Despite being pro-business she was heroically willing to face down the oil industry when it was corrupting the government of Alaska, a kind of bravery we need more of on both sides of the aisle.

Perhaps the most moving aspect of the book is the way in which she never waivers in her family commitments throughout the political journey. She passes up an opportunity to contest a Senate seat in order to manage her son's hockey team. She breast feeds in front of a taken-aback lawmaker. Team Palin is a part of every campaign and a constant presence in her official roles. Her family is at the center of her life in a way that feels whole and balanced, which is both impressive and commendable as we all seek to balance competing demands on our time.

In reading the book, I started to see a lot more of myself and my upbringing in Sarah. I too had grown up in a frozen land - Northern Minnesota - a place of unpretentious, middle-class, hardworking people who believe in personal responsibility and straight-talking integrity. We, too, had our sled dog races, subzero temperatures and a spirit of camaraderie to make it through. I began to see her political values as a natural extension of those tough-minded virtues, enabling her to take on daunting tasks and succeed at each level of life.

My developing appreciation of her formative years in the book led to a different view of the pressure cooker of national, presidential politics - I felt far more compassion for the ugly way in which she was attacked by the press, dismissed by the opposition, and muzzled by patronizing campaign bosses. She faced strong prejudices from people like myself who were scared that her more black-or-white, provincial-seeming perspective would someday be in the Oval Office. We were also worried by her folksy appeal and ability to attack Obama aggressively while appearing quite charming. The result of that reaction was a barrage of distorted stories, inflated fears, and downright misrepresentations, some of which were quite damaging to her family. After reading in her own words what she went through, I felt more compassion for her and dismay about the meat grinder that we've created for political leaders - an occupation for which we truly need our best and brightest.

Reading Going Rogue makes me understand that Sarah is not the ruthlessly ambitious and cutthroat caricature we feared; she is a woman who has befriended Democrats personally and professionally, shown real leadership in fighting corruption, and taken a more nuanced position on several issues in which she seemed far more polarizing. She seems quite sincere in her desire to serve in whatever way the universe calls for that service.

All that said, I still bristled when she launches in the final part of the book into a diatribe about what our country needs, which is strongly colored with right-wing platitudes and a self-righteous air as well as the tendency to portray liberals as the enemy rather than fellow allies in evolving our country. I would love to see more thoughtful reflections on positions and values, a deeper understanding of history, and less of the combative edge, all of which would make her a more unifying leader (and likely lead to fewer arrows back at her and her family). But that may not be her role. She is more of a super-charged Mom of the great white North, flashing into action to fight for what she sees as right, inspiring the Everyman and Everywoman to take personal responsibility for their lives and their country. She has the same qualities as a mother bear, with a fierce love that is eager to protect her cubs (or her country). If she's on your side, that can be exhilarating. But it can also reinforce the kind of partisan warfare that the book ultimately demonstrates is so destructive. My prayer is that this admirable woman can more fully embrace the idea that we all are on the same team here on planet earth. It's an all hand-on-deck moment for humanity and both conservatives and progressive values and people are needed.

Most of all, I come way from the book seeing Sarah as a woman who loves her family deeply, seeks to live a life of integrity, and wants America to be strong, successful and vibrant. While I may disagree with some of her policies and perspectives, I can better respect both her sincere patriotic intent as well as her willingness to take on hard fights in the service of democracy, in addition to her championing of the everyday people who often feel marginalized in our political process. I still would not vote for her for President, but I do respect her more as a person and as a leader of an important base of Americans.

I come away from reading Going Rogue feeling that it would be a useful act of citizenship for all those who feel prejudice towards her to read her book and meet her on her own turf in order to heal the lingering prejudices. I feel more balanced for having done so. I would also urge conservatives who hate or fear Obama to read his autobiography to better understand the man behind the political leader and thus heal their own biases.

The way I see it, healing the rift between Democrats and Republicans helps to heal the rift in our own hearts. The truth is that each party tends to champion one side of America's core values and we need both to operate in complementary and respectful ways for us to address the challenges we face. As each of us heals that prejudice in ourselves, we truly become part of the solution.

Dan Brown, Mitch Albom, Bestselling Authors Pick Books To Give (VIDEO)

2009-12-15T13:05:15Z

Bestselling authors recommend their favorite books: Dan Brown, Jeff Kinney, Mitch Albom and more tell us which books--non-fiction, novels, cookbooks, children's books--they're giving to loved ones for the holidays.

Are there any you would add? Let us know in the comments section below.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy