Gore: A Political Life sheds revealing light on Al Gore's years at St. Albans, the prep school for Washington's power elite, and Harvard, where he roomed with actor Tommy Lee Jones; his service in Vietnam for the sake of his father's political career; his attending divinity school to "atone for his sins"; the plodding journalist-turned-investigative-reporter, suddenly catapulted into Congress by his political inheritance; his relentless battle for the spotlight on Capitol Hill and the driving ambition that led to his first presidential campaign before he was forty; the Al Gore who has been masked by his famous wooden exterior. It is an emotional - his critics would say hysterical - Al Gore who has written that America is a "dysfunctional civilization" whose abuse of the environment is comparable to the Nazis' genocide against the Jews; and who has, like an Old Testament prophet, visited homeless victims of natural disasters, only to lecture them on the vengeance of global warming.