5 Nonfiction Books That’ll Reassure You This Isn’t the Craziest Election on Record

Barnes & Noble ^ | May 18, 2016 | B&N reads

[statestreet]

No one said politics was painless, but no one said it had to be quite this painful, either. We’re still about six months out from the 2016 presidential election, but it already feels like we’ve been doing this for two years—because we have. The election season to date has been contentious, uncomfortable, and, more than occasionally, certifiably nuts. No matter where you line up on the political spectrum, we can all agree on that.

But not all is lost. Democracy is messy, and we have a host of zany elections under our belt as a nation. Luckily, most of them have been written about extensively. If you find yourself dodging political advertisements and counting the calendar days until November 9, then try curling up with a retelling of any one of our other crazy leadership transitions. Go on. It can’t hurt.

[sparklite2]

1920 was a remarkable election year. This was an America in transition, out of World War II and into an urbanized nation

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WWII, eh?

[The people have spoken]

Good catch.

[Dick Bachert]

Here's one of them.

[bootless]

Somehow, BN missed this one. “At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election.” Excellent recount from Sammon, who was embedded inside the Gore campaign, poor guy.

https://www.amazon.com/At-Any-Cost-Tried-Election-ebook/dp/B001TUZY0Q

[GOPJ]

Good one.

[Fiji Hill]

Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Aethenium, 1961) is one-sided, heavily biased toward the Democrats.

Another author mentioned is David Pietrusza. I wanted to read his book 1960 : LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon : The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies (New York: Union Square, 2008), but I stopped reading after the first page when the author asserted that in 1960, America was ready for the change in direction that John F. Kennedy represented. Not wanting to read a one-sided hagiography of Kennedys, I took the book back to the library.