Sarah Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, published in November 2009, lacked an index. Why? An index, as explored in the previous post, would have been an invaluable tool to the scholars who will undoubtedly refer to the 413-page book to survey the political climate during the 2008 presidential election and Sarah Palin’s role as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate. Other readers may want to refer to an index to find coverage of her interview with Katie Couric or the Saturday Night Live skits. Whether the book was rushed to print or whether Palin tried to foil “the Washington read,” a practice in which people look up their names in the index before purchasing the book, the lack of an index is a huge flaw.
The American Society for Indexing (ASI) awarded Sarah Palin and HarperCollins Publishers a Golden Turkey Award for not including an index, and in their memo dated November 20, 2009 posted to the ASI discussion list, took the opportunity to tout why indexes are so important. ASI says that “Palin’s book performs a crucial public service. The inaccessibility of information in this text makes it clear to any reader that a good index is essential to a book’s long-term value. Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue has no index at all – a brilliantly simple if deviant way of proving the need for an index, worthy of one who prides herself on being a bit of a maverick.”
To fill the void, since Sarah Palin did not put an index in her book, others have produced indexes for Going Rogue and posted them on the Internet. I am including links to two, one from Slate and the other from The New Republic:
The Going Rogue Index from Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2235917/
The Going Rogue Index from The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-going-rogue-index
Despite these indexers’ commendable efforts, there is no substitute for including an index in the original book.
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