A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2020
A
concise, brilliant, and trenchant examination of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s
successful lifelong quest for the presidency by National Book Award
winner Evan Osnos.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been
called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest—fortunate to have
sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House,
but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has
suffered.
Yet even as Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, it
has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of
politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of
fortune. As he says, “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable,
but giving up is unforgivable.” His trials have forged in him a deep
empathy for others in hardship—an essential quality as he leads America
toward recovery and renewal.
Blending up-close journalism and
broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014,
draws on nearly a decade of reporting for The New Yorker to
capture the characters and meaning of 2020’s extraordinary presidential
election. It is based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing
conversations with more than a hundred others, including President
Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of
activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members.
This
portrayal illuminates Biden’s long and eventful career in the Senate,
his eight years as Obama’s vice president, his sojourn in the political
wilderness after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his
decision to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, and his choice of
Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate.
Osnos ponders
the difficulties Biden faces as his presidency begins and weighs how a
changing country, a deep well of experiences, and a rigorous approach to
the issues, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait, Biden
emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy—a
man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.
