Sometimes when we punch

By Dan Hill - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 23 Comments

Tom Donoghue

“Sugar Shane Mosley will be getting a personal rendition of Sometimes When We Touch from Manny on May 7–on his chin and ribs—all night!”—Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach

February 1964—47 years before the Manny Pacquiao-Shane Mosley fight in Vegas on May 7

“Daggum, Liston is going to chomp up that blabbermouth Cassius Clay, and then spit him out like a bad meal,” my dad is howling. Dad, who used to teach boxing in the U.S. Army, is out of his mind with excitement as the transistor radio blasts out the preamble to the Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston bout. Ducking and weaving as he shadowboxes with an imaginary opponent, his meaty fists are a blur of left jabs and right uppercuts. Bam! Carried away, he smacks the kitchen wall, the dishes on our kitchen table rattling as forks and spoons tumble to the floor. I’m transfixed.

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Review: The Central Park Five

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Few crimes in New York City’s history elicited the public frenzy surrounding the April 19, 1989, attack on Trisha Meili in Central Park. The 28-year-old investment banker was out for a run when she was savagely raped, beaten and left for dead. The assault, pinned on a group of black and Hispanic boys aged 13 to 16 who’d been misbehaving in the park that night, incited media diatribes about civic decay. Circus-like court cases found five of the boys guilty in 1990. Then, in 2002, convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes confessed to the attack and the five convictions were overturned.

Burns’s deconstruction of how justice was hijacked is part police procedural, part courtroom drama, part cultural critique. It’s riveting, eye-opening and disquieting. Her greatest accomplishment lies in depicting the humanity of characters previously reduced to stereotypes—the five falsely accused as well as Meili, who miraculously recovered.

New York City of the late 1980s was much like the Gotham of comic books—gritty, crime-ridden and riven by class and race divides. Media seized upon the rape of the affluent, white Meili, who was dubbed “the Central Park jogger”; it stoked public fury by referring to the crime as a “wilding” and the suspects as a “wolf pack,” racially charged terms that hearkened back to mob lynchings.

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Review: From This Moment On

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

The remarkable trajectory of Shania Twain’s life could provide fodder for dozens of Lifetime Network movies. Eileen Twain grew up dirt poor in a northern Ontario household riven by domestic violence; she paid her musical dues in crappy Timmins bars, then cared for her siblings after her parents were killed in a car crash. A Nashville record deal led to marriage to Mutt Lange, a big-time producer who helped pave her way to international stardom. In 2008, she was thrust into the tabloid glare when Lange left her for his long-time assistant and Twain’s close friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Then, a fairy-tale twist: Twain finds solace, and later, love, with Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, whom she married this year.

Yet what makes Twain’s new memoir riveting is not events per se but her engaging, nuanced retelling of them. She’s a natural storyteller. The depiction of her early years portrays poverty in heart-wrenching details: subsisting on mustard sandwiches, longing to belong to a “roast beef” family with order and security. Twain insightfully details the complex dynamics of family dysfunction. Even after watching in horror as her father almost kills her mother, she still loves him and recognizes the cycle of violence that her parents can’t seem to escape.

Her musical education is charmingly and vividly depicted: wanting to sing harmonies with Karen Carpenter; peeing her pants before singing at a school performance. As her success grows, the texture of the telling diminishes slightly. By the time Twain recounts her devastating marital breakup, the rendering is almost generic, obviously to protect her son. She is discreet when discussing Lange, blaming the betrayal on the other woman.

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Got Senate reform if you want it

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 9:02 AM - 98 Comments

I can think of three possible explanations for Stephen Harper’s feckless approach to the Senate. Two speak to his long term strategic goals:

1. He hopes to spur real reform to make the Senate a more effective and legitimate federal institution.

or

2. He doesn’t want reform. What wants is to exacerbate and accelerate the decline of federal institutions, in order to further undermine Ottawa’s legitimacy in the eyes of Canadians.

But there’s a third possibility, which is that

3. For Harper,  Senate reform is just a tactical device designed to placate his base, enrage the opposition, and titillate the media.

My belief is that Harper’s strategic goal is (2), and he’s happy to engage in (3) to the extent that it might also result in (2). But let’s adopt the principle of charity and assume that Harper actually wants to reform the Senate in order to improve the federal government. Or if that’s too much of a mental stretch, let’s pretend that we had a prime minister who actually cared about the legitimacy and effectiveness of federal institutions. How should we reform the Senate?

Let me take the occasion to once again break a lance for Campbell Sharman’s 2008 paper for the IRPP on how to give political legitimacy to an un-elected Senate.

What bedevils the debate over the Senate  is the assumption, shared by  reformers and abolitionists alike, is that the status quo is  intolerable in a modern democracy and the only way to give the Senate  any legitimacy is to turn it into an elective chamber. Sometimes, though, it takes an outsider to give your slumbering dogmas a shake.    Continue…

Concussions: the untold story

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 15 Comments

Photograph by George Widman/AP

Before there was Sidney Crosby, there was Eric Lindros. Both were hockey prodigies as young teenagers. Both were drafted first overall into the NHL. Both won the league MVP in their early 20s, both were captain of Team Canada at the Olympics, and both were hailed as the next Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux. And then, in a fraction of a second, both fell victim to devastating concussions. The toll on Crosby, who has been sidelined since January, remains to be seen. But most fans know that Lindros was never the same after a series of blows to the head—at least eight by the time he retired in 2007. What few know, however—what he’s never talked about publicly before—is the psychological and emotional toll of those concussions.

That a Herculean hockey legend such as Lindros (he is six foot four and 255 lb.) is speaking out with disarming candour about the panic and desolation that he has endured is unprecedented. “You’re in a pretty rough-and-tumble environment with this sport. Talking about these things—you don’t talk about these things,” says Lindros. So while he was playing in the NHL, Lindros mostly kept his game face on. “You got to understand, you want to wake up in the morning and you want to look at yourself and say, ‘I’ve got the perfect engine to accomplish what I need to in this game tonight.’ You are not going to look in the mirror and say, ‘Boy, I’m depressed.’ ”

But there were signs that the concussions had transformed him, both as a man and a hockey player, for the worse. “I was extremely sarcastic. I was real short. I didn’t have patience for people,” says Lindros, 38. That rudeness mutated once he stepped on the ice into fear that the next concussion was just one hit away. “That’s why I played wing my last few years,” he explains of changing positions late in his career. “I hated cutting through the middle. I was avoiding parting the Red Sea.” Off the ice, Lindros developed a paralyzing sense of dread at the very thought of public speaking or of being in a crowd—once routine activities for the sports superstar. “I hated, absolutely hated, that. I’d avoid those scenarios. I didn’t like airports. I didn’t like galas. It would stress me out.”

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Back in the fold

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 5:31 PM - 11 Comments

Maxime Bernier notes his cabinet appointment.

Small businesses, including those in Canada’s tourism sector, are the backbone of our economy. Entrepreneurship and economic development are topics that I have felt passionately about for a very long time. My native region, the Beauce, is often described as the kingdom of small businesses. I am thus very happy to play a role in our new government with the goal of maintaining the best environment possible so that Canada’s small businesses continue to prosper.

It should be noted that as a minister, I am like all my colleagues bound by cabinet solidarity and my public declarations must reflect the government’s positions. I therefore have less scope than I had as a simple MP to express my ideas and take public stands on various topics, as I did these past few years. The content of this blog will thus be a bit different from now on.

How much does it suck to be Jacques Gourde right now?

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 5:28 PM - 4 Comments

Being a Conservative MP from Quebec is a bit like joining the mother of all affirmative action programs. We have a grand total of five MPs in a province that represents roughly a quarter of the country’s population. Translation: cabinet positions for all! Even Max Bernier, whose I-forgot-a-bunch-of-secret-documents-at-my-somewhat-dodgy-girlfriend’s-house debacle relegated him to backbench purgatory in 2008, got a nod. (Granted, “Junior Minister For Tourism and Small Business” doesn’t have quite the ring as “Foreign Affairs Minister”, but still…) It’s a nice bit of spin for the Conservatives: 80 per cent of Quebec Tories are sitting at the table. Even those who lost their freakin’ election got a piece of the pie: Larry Smith and Josée Verner will now graze at the lush Senate pastures for their efforts.

Weep, then, for poor Jacques Gourde. Not only does he get left out of cabinet, he actually has less power for winning the election than Smith and Verner do for losing.

The selflessness to resign, the willingness to be reappointed

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 4:37 PM - 4 Comments

Two months before being reappointed to the Senate, Fabian Manning seems to have commended himself on his willingness to resign.

Just before the election, Manning compared a Senate workday to that of an MP, implying it was less work. ”I had a choice. I could have stayed in the Senate and gone on with a lifestyle that wouldn’t necessarily have me up every day working on behalf of the people. I chose not to,” said Manning, when he announced he was leaving the Senate on March 28.

Econowatch: May 2011

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 4:35 PM - 3 Comments

A funny thing happened on the way to the Tory majority. Partway through the federal election campaign, around the time the words “NDP” and “surge” appeared together for the first time, the S&P/TSX index lost its footing. Economists were quick to read the tea leaves: global investors clearly feared Canada might end up with a weak, wobbly minority government headed by socialists. Instead, Canadians voted for the strong, stable majority promised by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at which point investors ran screaming for the exits. Over the next four days, the market shed five per cent of its value.

Were investors saying a Harper majority was worse than an NDP minority? Of course not. The episode simply revealed that investors believe the main factor driving Canada’s economic future isn’t which party sits in power, but whether commodity prices stay high. The resource boom was the reason for our strong employment, resilient housing sector and phenomenal stock market returns of the last decade. In the same way, the dramatic rebound in commodities in 2009 enabled Canada to sail through the recession mostly unscathed—whatever the Tory’s Action Plan ads claimed. Investors know this, and that the reverse is also true. A sharp commodities correction could cripple the economy. Continue…

Senate appointments: "There oughtta be a law"

By John Geddes - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 112 Comments

There is no appointment to the Senate that sits well with me. The patronage chamber is an affront to democracy no matter who gets to ride its gravy train. But to appoint individuals who have only just been rejected by the voters in an election, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper did today, compounds the insult.

Jack Layton commented on this very situation during the recent campaign when he talked to Maclean’s editors and writers. The NDP leader alluded to the day in the House back in 2007 when Harper seemed open, if only for a tantalizing moment, to the idea that the Senate could be abolished after a referendum.

“Stephen Harper was getting frustrated and he said essentially, well, y’know if certain things don’t happen, maybe we should have a referendum on the Senate,” Layton recalled.

“We kind of came that close, but then he saw the opportunity to put in an awful lot of his friends, even defeated candidates. Now, why doesn’t that get commentators more upset? Defeated members of Parliament! Somebody who is turfed out, then getting appointed to the Senate! I mean, pardon me, but there oughtta be a law.”

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Gadhafi's wife and daughter may be in Tunisia

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 3:58 PM - 2 Comments

There are unconfirmed reports that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s wife, Safia, and daughter, Aisha, are now in Tunisia. A Tunisian security source told Reuters that the two crossed the border several days ago with a Libyan delegation.

Reuters

Orphan "planets" discovered

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 3:33 PM - 0 Comments

Japanese astronomers say they have found free-floating “planets” that don’t orbit a star—at least 10 Jupiter-sized objects that they couldn’t connect to a solar system, the BBC reports. Writing in the journal Nature, these scientists say the objects could be as common as are stars in the Milky Way. Measuring using bends of light in more distant stars, the scientists found evidence of 10 Jupiter-size objects with no parent stars within 10 Astronomical Units (AU), one of which equals the distance of the Sun to the Earth. After analyzing them further, they concluded these planets don’t have parent stars. Based on the numbers found, they predict orphan planets could be very common.

BBC News 

On the way out

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 1 Comment

The CBC talks to Mark Holland on his exit from Ottawa.

I remember coming to this place on a Gr. 8 class trip, it was my first time in these buildings, and just being filled with a sense of awe and wonder and looking at them for all the possibility they held: a place where you could change the country, a place where you could make a difference. It was a little bit hard coming up here today and looking at those same buildings and feeling pain, that the experience, maybe for now, maybe forever, is at an end. I tried to let go of that as fast as I could and reconnect with that sense of awe, because these are the same buildings, they hold the same promise. They can do fantastic and remarkable things. It’s all in how you look at it. And that’s a choice. I choose to look at it through the same eyes that I looked at it when I was that kid coming through here for the first time. I don’t ever want that to change, because this is a remarkable place, amazing things can happen here and I can never lose sight of that.

Other exit interviews are here.

Coffee is linked to reduced risk of prostate cancer

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 3:10 PM - 22 Comments

Men who drank six cups or more of coffee a day were found to be 20 per cent less likely to develop prostate cancer, the most common cancer in men, the BBC reports. The new study, which looked at almost 50,000 men, found they were also 60 per cent less likely to develop an aggressive form of the disease, which can spread to other parts of the body. No difference was found between the caffeinated and decaffeinated study, which suggested that caffeine wasn’t the cause. But even one to three cups a day was found to lower the risk of lethal prostate cancer by 30 per cent. The study followed these men, all U.S. health professionals, from 1986 to 2006.

BBC News

Rejected by voters, Conservatives are Senate-bound

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 2:17 PM - 14 Comments

Stephen Harper plans to appoint a trio of Conservatives defeated in the last election to the Senate. Larry Smith and Fabian Manning, both of whom stepped down from their Senate positions to run as Conservatives, as well as former cabinet minister Josée Verner, are headed to the Upper Chamber. On the night he lost his bid for a Montreal-area seat in the House of Commons, Smith notably said he wouldn’t return to the Senate.

Canadian Press

Canadian wins bronze for moustache

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 6 Comments

Evan Gillespie, a 23-year-old Calgarian, placed third in the “Freestyle” moustache category at the World Beard and Moustache Championships held last weekend at the Norwegian Moustache Club in Trondheim, Norway. He was the only Canadian who placed in the competition this year. Gillespie was beaten by American Keith “Gandhi Jones” Haubrich who won his third straight world title in the freestyle moustache category. The overall best in show was awarded to Germany’s Elamr Weisser who cultivated a reindeer-themed beard.

CNN

Photo of Evan Gillespie

World Beard and Moustache Championships results

Consolation prizes

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 1:58 PM - 49 Comments

Stephen Harper, a champion of an elected senate, has quietly appointed three Conservatives—Josee Verner, Larry Smith and Fabian Manning—who were just rejected by voters

“Our Government’s top priority remains the economy. As Canada emerges from the global economic recession, we will continue to help create jobs and growth,” said the Prime Minister. “We will continue focusing our efforts on getting tough on crime, in order to make our streets and communities safer.”

“I look forward to working with each towards a strong economic recovery and safer communities across the country … Our Government will continue to push for a more democratic, accountable and effective Senate,” concluded the Prime Minister.

Josee Verner, the former minister of intergovernmental affairs, was defeated in Louis-Saint-Laurent. Mr. Manning, a former Conservative MP, was defeated in 2008, appointed to the Senate in 2009, resigned to run in this year’s election and then defeated again in Avalon. Mr. Smith was appointed to the Senate in 2010, resigned to run in this year’s election and finished third in Lac-Saint-Louis.

Missing Canadian journalist released by Iran

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian journalist Dorothy Parvaz has been released by Iran and is now back in Doha, Qatar, where she works for Al Jazeera’s English language news network. Parvaz, 39, went missing on April 29 when she travelled to Syria to cover the government crackdown on political dissidents. She was deported to Iran shortly after she was detained, according to Syrian officials.  Earlier this week, Iran commented on Parvaz’s situation, saying the Iranian-born journalist was arrested for carrying an expired Iranian passport. Todd Barker, Parvaz’s fiancé, said that while in Iran she was “treated very well, she was interrogated, but she’s fine.”

Globe and Mail

Canada orders 1,300 smart bombs

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 1:42 PM - 9 Comments

Canada’s defence department has ordered more than 1,300 laser-guided smart bombs, reportedly for use in the operation against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The bombs are estimated to cost $100,000 each and follow reports NATO allies involved in operations in Libya are running out of weapons (NATO has denied the claims). As of Monday, Canadian CF-18 fighter jets had flown 272 sorties, but the Defence Department has not said how many bombs those planes have dropped. Though Gadhafi has so far successfully resisted efforts to oust him, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said over the weekend that Canada has no intention of sending more planes or expanding its role in Libya.

Ottawa Citizen

CSIS secretly adds Canadians to US terror watch lists: WikiLeaks

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 1:32 PM - 9 Comments

Thanks to a recent smattering of confidential documents leaked by WikiLeaks, it has been revealed that CSIS secretly gave the names of 27 Canadian citizens to the U.S. during the years 2009 and 2010, effectively flagging them as potential terrorists. The names of 14 foreign nationals living in Canada were handed over as well, the documents reveal. According to the CBC’s Neil Macdonald, some of the people were named solely because of their associations with other suspects. Usually, when Canada points out terror suspects to the U.S., their names are added to a “Visa Viper list,” meaning they are unlikely to be admitted to the United States. Quoting unnamed security officials, Macdonald said CSIS hands names to the U.S. because it feels the consequences of a terrorist attack on the American soil originating north of the border “could be cataclysmic for Canada.”

CBC News

Harper unveils new cabinet

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 12:19 PM - 15 Comments

Stephen Harper pulled back the curtain on a new, slightly larger cabinet on Tuesday. Among the most notable changes are John Baird taking over for the departed Lawrence Cannon as foreign affairs minister and Tony Clement’s shift to the Treasury Board. Quebec MP Maxime Bernier is back in cabinet after a long exile and was named minister of state for small business. Small changes aside, Harper’s cabinet looks mostly like the old one: Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is staying put, as are Defence Minister Peter MacKay, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, Agricultural Minister Gerry Ritz, Environment Minister Peter Kent, Labour Minister Lisa Raitt and Heritage Minister James Moore. In all, membership in cabinet grew by one to 39, tying it with Brian Mulroney’s as the largest in Canadian history.

The Globe and Mail

Lars Von Trier, Nazi pornographer manqué

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 11:19 AM - 8 Comments

'Melancholia' director Lars Von Trier with Kirstin Dunst at Cannes press conference / photo by Brian D. Johnson

Lars Von Trier sure knows how to generate publicity. At this morning’s press conference for his competition entry, Melancholia, he did his best to downplay the merits of the film, saying, “Maybe it’s crap. Of course, I hope not. But there is quite a big possibility that this is really not worth seeing.” He went on to joke about how his next project would be an epic hardcore porn movie with Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who flanked him at the press conference and acted amused. After 20 minutes of this, I bolted to catch a repeat screening of Aki Kaurismaki’s  Le Havre. I figured that Von Trier was pretty much done. But by the time I got out of Le Havre (which is a gem), there was outrage about Von Trier all over the Internet. However, it was not about anything he’d said when I was there. He had embarked on an incendiary tangent near the end of the press conference. He talked about discovering, to his regret, that he was not Jewish, then mused that he could find some sympathy for Hitler and concluded: “Ok, I’m a Nazi.”

Now, I wasn’t there, but I can only assume the Danish enfant terrible was as serious about this Nazi stuff as he was about making hard core porn with Kirsten Dunst. But you  joke about Jews and Nazis at your peril; just ask Mel Gibson. Von Trier said, “I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out I was really a Nazi, because my family was German, Hartmann, which also gave me some pleasure.” He went on:

“What can I say? I understand Hitler. I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. . . I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I’m not for the Second World War, and I’m not against Jews. . . I am of course very much for Jews. No, not too much because Israel is a pain in the ass. But still . . . how can I get out of this sentence? OK, I’m a Nazi.”

Apparently Dunst and Gainsbourg were no longer amused. But Von Trier couldn’t let go of it. When a journalist charitably tried to bring the discussion back to the movie, asking if he might direct something on a bigger scale, he said, “Yeah, we Nazis … have a tendency to try to do things on a greater scale. Maybe you could persuade me.” He then made a crack about the press conference being the “final solution with journalists.”

It’s a perverse a way to publicize his movie, a sensitive tragedy about the end of the world that could be accused of many things, but is probably the least controversial of Von Trier’s films. Maybe he was trying to make up for it.

Kirsten Dunst in Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia'

Melancholia is the story of an ill-fated wedding that takes place in a vast seaside chateau surrounded by its own 18-hole golf course. Dunst plays the miserable bride, Gainsbourgh her sister, who is married to the wedding’s benefactor, a cold-blooded tycoon played by Keifer Sutherland. What looms over the entire story, however, is the approach a planet called Melancholia, which is on a lethal collision course with Eart. The film is preceded by an exquisite overture of super slow-mo, painterly images—from Dunst in a vast wedding dress, dragging herself across a golf green and sinking into it like quicksand, to an image of the bride floating like Ophelia.

To be sure, something is rotten in the state of this state of Denmark, but the malaise is cosmic. Continue…

This year's models

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 10:43 AM - 65 Comments

Welcome to live coverage of this morning’s cabinet shuffle, wherein we find out which backbenchers we have to pretend to take more seriously for the next little while.

There’s been a steady stream of Conservatives arriving at Rideau Hall and the Prime Minister is due shortly. So far we seem only to know for sure that John Baird will be the next Foreign Affairs Minister. Presumably he will be counted on to bluster away opposition criticism of the government’s international endeavours, charm foreign officials and periodically convene breathless news conferences to report the latest breathtaking developments in our make-believe war with Russia. Presumably he’ll do fine. His image problem notwithstanding.

10:45am. Our Andrew Coyne is already deeply disappointed with all of this. Follow his Twitter feed this morning to watch his head explode repeatedly.

10:52am. The Prime Minister has now arrived. The swearing in is to commence in about 20 minutes.

11:04am. CTV reports a 39-member ministry, which equals an all-time high mark. Welcome to the new era of smaller government.

11:07am. Peter Van Loan apparently goes back to House leader. Welcome to the new era of non-partisan Harper governance. Continue…

Review: The lies of Sarah Palin

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 27 Comments

As the title makes very clear, this is no “on the one hand, on the other hand” summation of the 2012 Republican presidential prospect. For Dunn, an award-winning investigative reporter who is a frequent contributor to the liberal Huffington Post, there is no other hand to Palin. (Except for one acknowledged factor, with which any fervent Palinite could agree. That sine qua non of presidency seekers, that all-consuming drive? She has it in spades.) Dunn has that quality too: his 400-plus pages setting up the case for Palin as a pathological liar, an “approval-seeker on steroids” and someone almost universally considered—by former supporters, let alone enemies—to have some sort of mental disorder, is backed by more than 100 in-depth interviews. It’s probably more than he needs; Dunn’s subject, after all, is the woman who signed her email announcing the birth of her fifth child, Trig, not with her name but with “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

The early Alaska material is interesting but probably too insider for most readers. Things pick up when Dunn gets to Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s manifestly inadequate vice-presidential vetting procedures in 2008. Everyone present at Palin’s last-minute audition for the job agrees that she was “direct and specific” on her belief in the theory of evolution. Everyone but Palin, that is—in her memoir, Going Rogue, she asserts she was forthright about her creationist beliefs. Given that McCain was adamant that any VP candidate wasn’t to bring more controversy—over intelligent design, for example—to a campaign that already had more than enough, it’s far easier to believe his staffers that an honest declaration of creationist beliefs would have sunk Palin’s chances. Those were early days in Palin’s national celebrity, but Dunn is just getting warmed up. For the rest of his book, in a stupefying and depressing parade, Palin and the record contradict each other as steadily as her popularity levels slide.

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