Buy from Amazon!

Gore: A Political Life

by Bob Zelnick*

A Favourite of 0, Read by 0, Owned by 1, Reviewed by 0, Quotes 0

Bob Zelnick gives Vice President Al Gore a critical once-over on these pages, chronicling his rise from a life on Embassy Row as the son of Senator Al Gore Sr. to his vice-presidency in the Clinton administration. Although not a hatchet job, the book does linger over the more controversial aspects of Gore's professional life: Zelnick clearly delights in recounting Gore's questionable fundraising practices (remember the 1996 Buddhist temple incident?), how today's antismoking animus clashes with his onetime pride in tobacco farming, his flip-flop on abortion and awkward attempts to justify it, his environmental extremism, and his incautious rhetoric ("no controlling legal authority"). Readers will also appreciate several sharp observations that have not yet attracted much attention. "Vice President Gore, who claims paternity of the term 'information superhighway,'" writes Zelnick, "had nothing to say during the first five and a half years of his vice-presidency about the biggest problem in the history of high-tech America"--the Y2K computer bug. There are also gossipy items: the Gores "resented the treatment their son had received" following a smoking-and-drinking-in-the-woods-with-girls incident and transferred Al III from one posh Washington prep school to another. On the whole, Gore skeptics will have their doubts affirmed--and his allies will confront troubling questions about the man who would be president. --John J. Miller