The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate

(Paperback)

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Description

After losing the closest American election in years, Al Gore remains a fascinating political figure, a man both revered and reviled. Drawing on documents, letters, and interviews with more than three hundred people, including six lengthy conversations with the vice president, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima look closely at the forces that have shaped Gore's life and career to explore the man behind the contradictory public persona. Beginning with Gore's earliest years -- when this son of a senator was torn between elite Washington and rural Tennessee -- one is struck by the image of a young American prince burdened by expectations of his likely political fate. With a new afterword written after the election, The Prince of Tennessee depicts Gore as an intelligent and competent man whose struggles with self-doubt and insecurity made him one of our least understood presidential candidates.

Reviews

Ben Macintyre The New York Times Book Review A fine, deep-mine biography...The authors come closer to the core Gore than any other biographies to date. Dante Chinni The Christian Science Monitor A great read. The authors do a masterly job of explaining [the Gore] paradox. Curtis Wilkie The Boston Globe Grounded in strong reporting and honest perception. Sparkles with vignettes drawn from hundreds of interviews. Steve Neal Chicago Sun-Times Balanced, insightful, and highly readable.

Author Bio

Born in Detroit, David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post. Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story; First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton; Rome 1960: The Olympics that Stirred the World; Barack Obama: The Story; Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero; They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967; and When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, which was hailed by Sports Illustrated as "maybe the best sports biography ever published." He lives in Washington, DC, and Madison, Wisconsin.