Discover the Best Books Written by Al Gore

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was the Democratic nominee for the 2000 presidential election, losing to George W. Bush in a very close race after a Florida recount. Gore was an elected official for 24 years. He was a representative from Tennessee (1977–1985) and, from 1985 to 1993, served as a senator from that state. 

He served as vice president during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001, defeating incumbents George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle in 1992 and Bob Dole and Jack Kemp in 1996. The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest presidential races in history. Gore and his running mate Joe Lieberman won the popular vote. Still, after a controversial election dispute over a Florida recount (settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 in favor of Bush), he lost the election to Republican opponent George W. Bush in the Electoral College.

After his term as vice-president ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned him (jointly with the IPCC) the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Gore is the founder and current chair of The Climate Reality Project, the co-founder, and chair of Generation Investment Management, the now-defunct Current TV network, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc., and a senior adviser to Google. 

Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading its climate change solutions group. He has been a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He served on the Board of Directors of the World Resources Institute.

Gore has received a number of awards that include the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007), a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and its 2017 sequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. In 2007, he was named a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year. In 2008, Gore won the Dan David Prize for Social Responsibility.

Gore was "dispirited" after his return from Vietnam. NashvillePost.com noted that "his father's defeat did service in a conflict he deeply opposed even more abhorrent to Gore. His experiences in the war zone don't seem to have been deeply traumatic in themselves; although the engineers were sometimes fired upon, Gore has said he didn't see full-scale combat. Still, he felt that his participation in the war was wrong."

Although his parents wanted him to attend law school, Gore first attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School (1971–72) on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for people planning secular careers. He later said he went there in order to explore "spiritual issues" and that "he had hoped to make sense of the social injustices that seemed to challenge his religious beliefs."

In 1971, Gore also began to work the night shift for The Tennessean as an investigative reporter. His investigations of corruption among Nashville's Metro Council members resulted in two councilmen's arrest and prosecution for separate offenses.

In 1974, he took a leave of absence from The Tennessean to attend Vanderbilt University Law School. His decision to become an attorney partially resulted from his time as a journalist, as he realized that, while he could expose corruption, he could not change it. Gore did not complete law school, deciding abruptly, in 1976, to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives when he found out that his father's former seat in the House was about to be vacated.