Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election
Author: Jeffrey Toobin
From the best-selling author of A Vast Conspiracy and The Run of His Life comes Too Close to Call—the definitive story of the Bush-Gore presidential recount. A political and legal analyst of unparalleled journalistic skill, Jeffrey Toobin is the ideal writer to distill the events of the thirty-six anxiety-filled days that culminated in one of the most stunning Supreme Court decisions in history.
Packed with news-making disclosures and written with the drive of a legal thriller, Too Close to Call takes us inside James Baker's private jet, through the locked gates to Al Gore's mansion, behind the covered-up windows of Katherine Harris's office, and even into the secret conference room of the United States Supreme Court. As the scene shifts from Washington to Austin and into the remote corners of the enduringly strange Sunshine State, Toobin's book will transform what you thought you knew about the most extraordinary political drama in American history.
The Florida recount unfolded in a kaleidoscopic maze of bizarre concepts (chads, pregnant and otherwise), unfamiliar people in critically important positions (the Florida Supreme Court), and familiar people in surprising new places (the Miami relatives of Eliбn Gonzбlez, in a previously undisclosed role in this melodrama). With the rich characterization that is his trademark, Toobin portrays the prominent strategists who masterminded the campaigns—the Daleys and the Roves—and also the lesser-known but influential players who pulled the strings, as well as the judges and justices whose decisions determined the final outcome. Toobin gives both camps a treatment they have not yet received—remarkably evenhanded, nonpartisan, and entirely new.
The post-election period posed a challenge to even the most zealous news junkie: how to keep up with what was happening and sort out the important from the trivial. Jeffrey Toobin has now done this—and then some. With clarity, insight, humor, and a deep understanding of the law, he deconstructs the events, the players, and the often Byzantine intricacies of our judicial system. A remarkable account of one of the most significant periods in our country's history, Too Close to Call is endlessly surprising, frequently poignant, and wholly addictive.
About the Author:
Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, the legal analyst at ABC News, and the author of the critically acclaimed bestsellers A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. He served as an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn and as an associate counsel in the office of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh—which provided the basis for his book Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case—United States Supreme Court v. Oliver North. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. Toobin lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
Economist
A good read . . . a brave book.
Chicago Sun-Times
A rich and readable reprise . . . by the New Yorker writer who shows brilliantly how the American legal system spun out of control.
People
A story as taut and surprising as any thriller. . . . Unimpeachable page-turner.
New York Daily News
Compulsively readable. . . . A Vast Conspiracy delivers new information, provides arresting perspective and is a helluva read for all that.
Boston Globe
An irresistibly readable new overview of the whole ugly case.
New York Times Book Review
An admirably clear, vigorously written, plain-spoken and common-sensical book.
New York Observer
A superlatively researched and written book.
New York Review of Books
A superb work of factual and legal analysis. . . . Few novels are as gripping.
See also: Sport in Consumer Culture or The Caribbean in the Wider World 1492 1992
Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life
Author: Alan Schom
A definitive biography of Bonaparte from his birth in Corsica to his death in exile on St Helena, this book examines all aspects of Bonaparte's spectacular rise to power and his dizzying fall. It offers close examination of battlefield victories, personal torments, military genius, Bonaparte's titanic ego and his relationships with the French government, Talleyrand, Wellington and Josephine. A consummate biography of a complex man.
The New York Times Book Review - Robert Gildea
A rip-roaring yarn...a vast dramatis personae of emperors and princesses, marshals and bishops, mistresses and murderers....Napoleon does, as it claims, present the whole Napoleon, the public and the private face....Schom has a lively style, and a neat turn of phrase, and his book reads well.
Robert Gildea
A rip-roaring yarn...a vast dramatis personae of emperors and princesses, marshals and bishops, mistresses and murderers....Napoleon does, as it claims, present the whole Napoleon, the public and the private face....Schom has a lively style, and a neat turn of phrase, and his book reads well. -- The New York Times Book Review
The New Yorker - Adam Gopnik
Polished, scholarly, and successful.
Washington Post Book World - Dan Wick
Meticulously researched... Schom presents a rounded portrait not only of Napoleon but also of the principal figures in his extraordinary life... and brilliantly presents Napoleon's life while appropriately deflating his legend.
Kirkus Reviews
A biography so negative, it even casts doubt on Napoleon's military genius. Historian Schom breaks no new ground in portraying the man who rose from the impoverished Corsican aristocracy to become emperor of France as a brutal, selfish manipulator who dreamed only of glory and cared little for other people. But even previous biographers who didn't think much of Bonaparte as a human being or a ruler usually conceded that he had no equal on the battlefield. Schom is at pains to refute this notion, beginning with a blistering account of the Egyptian campaign of 1798-99, during which the French army was decimated due to its general's failure to inform himself about the land he was invading or to properly plan for provisioning his troops, flaws that would have even more tragic consequences in Russia in 1812. The evaluation is so hostile, it's a little hard to understand how Egypt made Napoleon popular enough to sweep into power in November 1799—let alone how he managed to lead the French army triumphantly across most of Europe over the next 13 years. Despite his assertion that he covers 'every aspect of [Napoleon's] life and character,' Schom severely scants the monarch's sweeping political and social initiatives within France; not even the enduring Napoleonic Code gets much attention. This is old-fashioned narrative history, primarily concerned with personal intrigue among the elite and detailed accounts of battles, and lacking consideration of their broader context. On that limited basis, it's entertaining: vivaciously and rather sloppily written, effectively if not definitively researched (notes refer mostly to published sources rather than archives), with vivid charactersketches of all the Bonapartes, the agreeable and promiscuous Josephine, cynical foreign minister Talleyrand, and other key figures. More suitable for those looking for the proverbial 'good read' than anyone seeking deeper insights into a crucial transitional moment—and man—in French history.
What People Are Saying
Len Deighton
"Superb. Mr. Schom has achieved every historian's dream; using exemplary scholarship to write a page-turning best seller."
Gregor Dallas
"Schom has a lively style.....His technique....is very effective....[NAPOLEON] is a timely book."
John Maxwell Hamilton
"A badly needed comprehensive, one-volume life .[NAPOLEON] does a magnificent job of covering the full sweep of Napoleon's career."
Robert Gildea
"A rip-roaring yarn...a vast dramatis personae of emperors and princesses, marshals and bishops, mistresses and murderers....NAPOLEON does, as it claims, present the whole Napoleon, the public and the private face....Schom has a lively style, and a neat turn of phrase, and his book reads well."
Adam Gopnik
"Polished, scholarly, and successful."
Dan Wick
"Meticulously researched...Schom presents a rounded portrait not only of Napoleon but also of the principal figures in his extraordinary life...and brilliantly presents Napoleon's life while appropriately deflating his legend."
Ed Voves
"A darkly nuanced biography.....In many ways, Schom's strengths as a historian match those of his protagonist....Schom reveals a tactical mastery of the events of Napoleon's life, calling to mind the emperor's grasp of terrain. His book is bold in scope, and ...his salvos are devastating."
Carolyn Nizzi Warmbold
"Vigorously researched and often brilliantly written.[an] ultimately balanced, no-nonsense portrait that has the benefit of 20th-century science."
Bob Trimble
"Napoleon has fascinated mankind for two centuries, and Mr. Schom's book is just as fascinating."
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