Sarah Palin's memoirs will be released next week! To prepare, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

If you publish a memoir before the age of fifty (as Richard Nixon did in 1962, as Sarah Palin will in 2009), you must live the rest of your life in rivalry with it.

Because you turn fifty, and then sixty, and then seventy, and then eighty (as Richard Nixon did in 1993, as Sarah Palin may in 2044), and like any reflective citizen, like any complicated soul, you modulate your opinions, you undertake works and pleasures, you prove your mettle, you reveal your great self. You [...]

To while away the days until the publication of Sarah Palin's memoirs on November 17th, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

So much of life is ephemera!

So much of politics is kerfuffles!

Consider Geraldine Ferraro's first memoir. She wrote it in 1985, about her 1984 campaign for the vice presidency. Here, on page 62, is how she sums up Ronald Reagan's first term in office: Programs were being cut back or eliminated, ketchup was being substituted for vegetables in school lunches, the President was blaming trees for pollution, and Interior Secretary James Watt was describing the members of his coal commission as "a [...]

To while away the days until the publication of Sarah Palin's memoirs on November 17th, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

Say you were to make a list of every American who has ever run for the vice presidency. Say you were to take that list to your local library. Say you were to sit at the reference computer, and say you were to type the names on your list into the "author" field of the electronic catalog, and say you were to run a search on each and every one. Among the results would be Doing Business by the Good Book: 52 Lessons on [...]