On May 22, 2010, Joe McGinniss moved into a strategically well-situated house in Wasilla, Alaska. It was next door to the home of former Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, but that understates the highly exploitable proximity of the two places. They were very close together. The Palins could probably hear tweets from the newly hatched birds that Mr. McGinniss excitedly uses as filler for “The Rogue,” his book about his summer-long experiment in homesteading. “The grebe chicks have hatched!” he needlessly exclaims.
Tweets emanated from the Palin place too. But they were the kind that Mr. McGinniss could have monitored from home in Massachusetts.
Mr. McGinnis, who has been writing best sellers since “The Selling of the President” in 1969, starts this book by affecting a gee-whiz attitude about his amazing new digs. (“Forty years in the business and I’ve never had a piece of luck like this.”) But he doesn’t get far with that attitude. Ten pages into “The Rogue” he has already blown his cover, printing a map to the Palins’ isolated house. He describes having gone to the Palin door with a signed copy of his book about Alaska, “Going to Extremes,” and exploiting this encounter to engage the family’s older son, Track, in conversation. But had Mr. McGinniss been a good neighbor, he would have delivered that book without showing up unannounced.
Mr. McGinniss explains that he was shocked, just shocked, at the angry response his presence in Wasilla provoked. But “The Rogue” makes the Palins’ widely publicized anger understandable, even to readers who might have defended his right to set up shop in their neighborhood and soak up the local color. Although most of “The Rogue” is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/books/joe-mcginnisss-the-rogue-on-sarah-palin-review.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28
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