Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election (Thorndike American History) Book

When Americans cast their ballots on November 7, no one expected that the outcome would still be in doubt more than a month later. For the first time ever, it seemed, the presidential election had ended in a dead heat, with but a few hundred votes in Florida separating Al Gore and George W. Bush. The stage was set for an extraordinary drama of recounts, challenges, court cases - and hanging, swinging, and dimpled chads. The Washington Post, America's premier newspaper for politics and elections, has been in the forefront of the post-election coverage, and in this book its award-winning staff provides the first full-length account of the closest and strangest election in our history - from the last frantic days of campaigning to the networks' premature election-night projections; from the "butterfly ballot" to the manual recounts; from the first legal challenges to the final adjudication. The Post has offered unsurpassed coverage of the events that transfixed the nation and the world, and now its all-star team of reporters has produced a page-turner to rival the best political thrillers. Deadlock is a wholly original work of history-in-the-making, written by David Von Drehle and Ellen Nakashima, two of the paper's most accomplished political writers, drawing on the reporting of over two dozen top reporters and columnists in Washington, Florida, and Texas. The Post will publish a seven-part front-page series based on the book right before Inauguration Day (January 14-20), and the book will contain additional chapters that will not have appeared in the newspaper. Books will be in stores by mid-February, making it the first post-election book available to readers. Phil Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post in the 1950s and early 1960s, famously called newspapers "the first rough draft of history." His newspaper has now produced not a rough draft, but history itself - rich, detailed, nuanced, and groundbreaking. This is a book that no citizen should do without.Read More