Joe McGinniss' The Rogue Fails to Shock or Awe

Joe McGinniss has been writing about presidential politics since 1968, but his new book on Sarah Palin, The Rogue, is "dated, petty, and easily available to anyone with Internet access," writes Janet Maslin in the New York Times. With allegations of cocaine use and sex with basketball stars, The Rogue deals in leading questions and "unsubstantiated gossip," and is "too busy being nasty to be lucid," she writes.

Maslin has little patience for the author's faux shock at how he was reviled locally for moving in next door to Palin to write his book. McGinniss has managed to unearth Wasillans willing to spill the beans on the state of Palin's toilet, she notes, but such revelations only undermine his more serious claims. The only truly insightful part of The Rogue is in McGinniss' understanding of PR, she writes: McGinniss "appreciates, not to say emulates," the Palin family's ability to "cash in on celebrity and contradict themselves without penalty." (More Sarah Palin stories.)