In The Lies of Sarah Palin, Geoffrey Dunn provides the first full-scale and in-depth political biography of the controversial Republican vice-presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska.

Based on more than two-hundred interviews---many of them with Republican colleagues and one-time political allies of Palin’s---and more than forty-thousand pages of uncovered documents, Dunn chronicles Palin’s troubling penchant for duplicity in grim detail, from her dysfunctional childhood in Wasilla through her contentious run for mayor and her failed governorship of Alaska. He also provides the shocking inside story of her betrayal of running mate John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign and her self-serving resignation as governor in July of the following year. Dunn deftly places Palin in the American tradition of right-wing demagogues---from Huey Long to Joe McCarthy---and details her troubling obsession with Barack Obama as it fuels her own political ambitions and a potential run for the presidency in 2012.

The Lies of Sarah Palin is a journalistic tour de force that vividly reveals the Queen of the Tea Party movement as a vengeful and manipulative empress without clothes. This is the definitive book on Sarah Palin.

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Geoffrey Dunn is an award-winning author and documentary filmmaker with more than three decades experience as an investigative reporter. A frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, where he has broken several national stories on Sarah Palin since the 2008 presidential campaign, Dunn has also served as a Senior Editor for Metro Newspapers in Northern California, where he has received awards for investigative journalism from the National Newspaper Association, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and the Peninsula Press Club. His documentary films include the award-winning Calypso Dreams; Miss…or Myth?; and Dollar a Day, 10¢ a Dance. Dunn received a B.A. in politics (with honors), as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has taught courses in documentary film, nonfiction writing and American political history and culture. He received an Excellence in Teaching Award there in 2000. Dunn was raised in an Italian-American fishing community and worked in the Pacific Coast fishery industry until the mid-1980s.

< "Dunn’s achievement is to tie together his immense amount of research into a finely wrought work that is fair to a succession of people from all across the political spectrum, all of whom had to deal with, for better or worse, the most intensely dishonest and divisive political personality in recent American history."--Firedoglake Book Salon< CHAPTER 1 Wasilla All I ever needed to know I learned on the basketball court.—Sarah Palin, Anchorage Daily NewsPalin seems to have assumed her election was instead a coronation. Welcome to Kingdom Palin, the land of no accountability.—Editorial, Mat-Su Valley FrontiersmanWith Sarah, do you get the feeling that in high school she was voted Least Likely to Write a Book and Most Likely to Burn One?—Robin Williams, Late Show with David LettermanTHE MATANUSKA AND SUSITNA valleys spread across the interior of southwest Alaska like a partially open Japanese fan, at a nearly 90 degree angle from one another. Both are formed by imposing mountain ranges along with the majestic Alaska Range the Talkeetna and Chugach, which sweeps northeast across central Alaska into the Yukon. “Young, soaring, vivid in form, tremendous in reach,” the novelist James Michener would write, “these peaks stab the frosty air to heights of twelve and thirteen, nineteen and twenty thousand feet. Denali, the glory of Alaska, soars to more than twenty thousand and is one of the most compelling mountains in the Americas.”Outsiders often refer to the region as the Mat-Su Valley, but longtime Alaskans, or Sourdoughs as they are called, more commonly refer to it as simply the Mat-Su or the Valley. It could be argued that in recent years the Mat-Su has become as much a cultural reference as it is a geographic index. Indeed, there’s a certain weight attached to the term that transcends place. It was to the Matanuska Valley, in the early 1970s, that Chuck and Sally Heath would bring their brood of four young children—Chuck Jr., Heather, Sarah, and Molly—to the close-knit community of Wasilla, located roughly forty-five miles down the George Parks and Glenn highways from downtown Anchorage. In the 1970s, it was a full hour’s drive, even in the best of conditions. Toda Read Less