Bristol and Willow, our teenage daughters, roamed ahead with friends, heads together, laughing, thumbs tapping cell phones. Inching through rivers of people with Trig, our four-month-old son, cradled in my arms, I zigzagged from booth to booth, from driftwood art to honeybee keeping to home-brewed salmonberry wine. Banjo music playing at the Blue Bonnet Stage, baleen etchings, grass-woven Eskimo baskets, and record-breaking giant vegetables grown under the midnight sun. With the gray Talkeetna Mountains in the distance and the first light covering of snow about to descend on Pioneer Peak, I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.

It was the Alaska State Fair, August 2008.

I don’t believe that God put us on earth to be ordinary. One thing is clear, she needs help from us ordinary citizens. It may be that she will continue to be in politics and may even attain additional elective office it may also be that by 2012, she will have left the national scene. I can understand why the GOP has had little to say and I can understand while the Democrats and the Liberals continue to vilify her, but it seems to me that there ought to be more of a groundswell behind her and her thinking. Yes, it is self-serving, but since nobody else has come forth to tell her side of the story, I'm glad she did.One cannot fail to ask is she an anomoly or is she the beginning of the future? I believe many would hope the latter but so far she is alone. Certainly, there is room for a Woodward and Bernstein investigation of 'headquarters.' It seems almost as if there was an intentional undermining of the qualities this candidate could put forth.At best, this book is an attempt to answer so many things that went unanswered between her nomination August 29 and the election. Indeed, it is astonishing to recollect in just a few days while reading this book, the mud that was flung at Sarah Palin.Baffling to me, especially after reading her book, was why she took the crap, both from the opposition as well as her own 'headquarters.' It just seems so out of character.

Sarah palin book going rogue