Customer Reviews

Overtime! The Election 2000 Thriller

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Not long before the chads stopped swinging in the last presidential election, pundits and pollsters were sharpening their wits and dusting off their finger pointing apparatus. Their goal was to isolate the who, what, where, why, and how of the controverial election results in Florida. That election brought everybody who was anybody, including the Supreme Court, to the edge of their seats for days. The indefatigable Sultan of Soundbites, UVA Professor Larry J. Sabato, had seen enough and done enough in politics to realize this was history, and deserved to be given a thorough investigation. So he collected a group of insiders and commentators to take their best shot at turning over stones and writing about what crawled out. The result was Overtime! The Election 2000 Thriller. No casual or serious student of US history should be without a copy. Congratulations to Dr. Sabato and Joshua Scott, his coauthor and editorial assistant from the UVA Center for Governmental Studies on a job exceptionally well done. Buy this book for yourself, and at the reasonable price, grab a couple copies for friends as well. It's guaranteed to reveal facts that even the media savvy US public has not to this point realized. Alyson L. Taylor-White, Editor, Virginia Review

Overtime is a great look back it this election. For me, it was interesting to go back and put the whole campaign/election in perspective from start to finish. It's also nice to read a book like this that seems to be written from a non-partisan viewpoint. Sabato presents both sides of all the issues and is equally critical of both campaigns. In about 12 years when my son is taking his high school civics class and needs a topic for a book report or paper - I will dust off this book and hand it to him. On a side note, I recently saw Mr. Sabato speak at a conference I attended. If you ever get the chance, go see him! He is very informative and quite humorous.

Ever since Theodore White died, I've been searching for a political author who can communicate the excitement of a campaign while grounding his or her work in facts. I've found him: Larry Sabato. I've read several of his books such as Feeding Frenzy, and I've been impressed. But OVERTIME is his best yet. He's put together an all-star team to tell the truth about the incredible election of 2000. Unlike a lot of the other books on 2000, he leaves out the spin and bias, and he focuses on reality. Who needs spin when you have the most dramatic election in modern American history? OVERTIME helped me to really understand the most historic election of my lifetime. It's the best book out there on 2000---BY FAR.

If you want the REAL inside scoop about the 2000 Presidential election, you have to read this book. What makes this book so credible is the bi-paritsan approach that is taken by Sabato who clearly asked key people from both camps to contribute. I was tired of hearing all of the slanted angles on the election with out an equal and appropriate resonse. This book is fair and really provided me with an "insiders angle" - it was a great read. If you are in to politics or curious about the true story from last November and December, you have to read this book.

Will only political junkies or long-ago residents of Florida (I plead partly guilty of the first and fully guilty of the second), appreciate this book? I think not, but it does help to have given up excessive idealism ("Politics is so corrupt!") and excessive cynicism ("People are so corrupt!") in favor of an occasional visit to realism.

With the media giving us mainly--and often only--sensation, and seeing law as a struggle by imperfect human beings to create some justice in the world, I liked best the stories told by the attorneys for both sides.

Once again, Larry Sabato has raised the bar on political writing. In what is easily the best book about the 2000 presidential election, Sabato has put together a fair and analytical review of the campaign, with complete analysis from scholars, campaign advisers, and journalists. From Ron Klain and Jeremy Bash explaining the Gore recount effort to Timothy Burger describing his adventures in reporting the Bush DUI story, this book is dynamite in giving new anecdotes and tales from the closest election this century. It is definitely worth buying.

There are many books that have been written on the subject: from Bill Sammon's book "At Any Cost" on the right to Alan Dershowitz' "Supreme Injustice" on the left. Sabato's is a rare thing, a book that tries to be impartial, and succeeds.

It has chapters by legal advisors to both Gore's and Bush's sides in the legal wrangles that followed the election, as well as journalists and academics. If you want to know what happened, as seen by all sides, this is about the only book that will tell you that.

The only negative point I can make is a printing job that is somewhat careless; missing apostrophes abound, and my copy has two of one page and is missing another. But that does not bear on the book's merit itself.