Tuesday, September 29, 2009

LiTwit

Palin's slapped her name on a 400-page book titled Going Rogue that was ghost-written in under four months.

It will have a number-purchased-vs.-number-read ratio greater than A Brief History of Time Volume 2: The Computations.

Brian Beutler started a "Failed Palin Book Titles" quasi-thread via Twitter which didn't go on for long. I'll rescue a few I enjoyed:

My favorite of all:
@msbellows: "Suck It Up + Board The Plane: Obstetrics the Alaska Way."

My favorite of my own: "Moose, Mousse, and Moues"

and more:

@brianbeutler "The Bridge to Nowhere: How John McCain Ruined My Life"
@keefs "The Origin of Specious: My Evolution"
@kcivey "Dress for Success on $2500 a Day"

To be a bit more serious, Palin isn't exactly known for being fully candid with those she's working with (ask the McCain campaign). Add to that tendency 1) the extreme rapidity of putting together 400 pages in three or so months; 2) the fact that her ghostwriter isn't a journalist; and 3) the notoriously poor fact-checking of book publishers and you have a recipe for a tome full of errors, blunders and falsehoods.

There's speculation that the publication date was pushed up to rush release prior to some critical books by real journalists. Makes sense to me. Even if not, the second edition is likely to be twice as big to incorporate all the corrections.

---
UPDATE: Wow, that was quick-- rewriting of history noted just a day after I wrote the above. I figured we'd have to wait weeks for errors and falsehoods to trickle out.

And there's this, too, from Rupert Muroch's NY Post no less:
Palin's bookers are said to be asking for $100,000 per speech, but an industry expert tells Page Six: "The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot."
The fact that she's very popular with the Republican base tells you a lot about what's wrong with this country.

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