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Summary
Summary
*A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR*
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.
Author Notes
Evan L.R. Osnos was born on December 24, 1976 in London. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008, best known for his coverage of China. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998. In the summer of 1999, Osnos joined the Chicago Tribune as a metro reporter, and, later, a national and foreign correspondent. He was based in New York at the time of the September 11 attacks. In 2002, he was assigned to the Middle East, where he covered the Iraq War and reported from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere.
In 2005, he became the China correspondent. In 2008, he was part of a Chicago Tribune team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Osnos joined The New Yorker in September 2008 and served as the magazine¿s China Correspondent until 2013. Osnos has contributed to the NPR radio show This American Life and the PBS television show Frontline. He has received two awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Osborn Elliott Prize for excellence in journalism from the Asia Society. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (2014), Osnos' first book, follows the lives of individuals swept up in China's "radical transformation. He was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction with - Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The Democratic presidential nominee is a soothing moderate who may become a Rooseveltian progressive, argues this probing but sympathetic biographical sketch. Journalist Osnos (Age of Ambition) draws on vivid reportage from his New Yorker profiles of Biden to paint him as an unprepossessing but effective politician who is good at connecting with voters and wrangling with congressional leaders and foreign potentates; dedicated to a "sobering case for moral decency, for reasonableness"; and "the man who between Americans and four more years of Trump," which is what matters most to "a country in peril." Osnos's less-than-hard-hitting character study downplays Biden's shaky performance during the early days of the Democratic primary campaign, interprets his gaffes and garrulousness as signs of passion and empathy, and styles his exaggerations and plagiarisms as "the excesses of a man who wanted every story to sing." Osnos offers a shrewd analysis of Biden's predicament as "the nominee of a party gradually marching left, which was desperate to win over moderates and Republicans who were terrified of that march to the left," and quotes liberal pundits on how Biden could maneuver a Bernie Sandersesque progressive agenda through Congress. The result is a portrait of the candidate that's smart and evocative, but not immune to wishful thinking. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners. (Oct.)
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue February 12, 1988 Aforty-five-year-old man--white male, father of three--awoke on the floor of his hotel room. He had been unconscious for five hours. He could barely move his legs. He did not know how he got there. He remembered only a flash of agony; he had given a speech in Rochester, New York, and returned to his room, where he felt a sensation akin to a cleaver parting his skull. For months, he had ignored a strange ache in his head and neck, burying it in Tylenol, blaming it on the ludicrous rigor of running for president while heading the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. The campaign had ended in embarrassment--a product of his own arrogance, he admitted to himself--but the head- aches had continued. The man heaved himself onto the bed. From there, his assistant got him to a plane to Delaware, where doc- tors identified a cranial aneurysm, the ballooning of an artery that fed the brain. His prospects for survival were so grim that a priest was summoned to deliver last rites, even before the man's wife could be there. In the hours that followed, he was rushed through the slanting snow of a storm to Washington, D.C., where a surgeon warned that the operation might rob him of the ability to speak. "I kind of wish that had happened last summer," the man replied. For three months, through more surgery, more complications, he was supine, confined to a hospital bed. Oddly enough, his failure in the presidential campaign had probably saved his life. Had he stayed on the road, crisscrossing New Hampshire and ignoring his symptoms, he might not be there at all. In the depth of his ordeal, a doctor turned to him and said he was a "lucky man." Seven months passed before the man could get back up and return to work. He told the first crowd he saw that he had been given a "second chance in life." More than thirty years after Joe Biden nearly died on his back, the moment is often lost amid the official milestones of his political biography. But that instant contains the defining pattern of his life--a journey of improbable turns, some spectacularly fortunate and others almost inconceivably cruel. Biden's ambition to reach the highest rungs of American power has driven his rise for more than five decades. When he was barely out of his teens, the mother of a girlfriend (later, his first wife, Neilia Hunter) asked about his professional goals. "Presi- dent," Biden said, and added, "of the United States." His political career placed him at pivotal moments of modern American history, including some of the nation's defining conflicts around race, gender, crime, health, capitalism, and warfare. He made mistakes, explained himself, and paid a price. Time and again, he defied predictions that he was finished--only to find himself, to his astonishment, beside Barack Obama, in a historic run for the White House. In his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, he said, "Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable." In the vice presidency--the most maligned job in Washington--Biden often projected the look of a man who couldn't quite believe his good fortune. The trials of his life had relieved him of some solemn self-regard. A British minister once asked him, in a private meeting, for the protocol in addressing one another. Biden gave a theatrical glance to either side, and said, "It looks like we're alone, so why don't you call me Mr. President and I'll call you Mr. Prime Minister." By 2020, he was a political veteran marked by so many years and battles that his opponents, and even some of his admirers, questioned the wisdom of yet one more race. And, then, he foiled the predictions once more, emerging as the Democratic nominee for president in a showdown of such grave implication for America's future that it made a mockery of the usual clichés about the most important election in our lifetime. He was in a one-on-one contest against Donald Trump for an office that was losing its stature as the leader of the free world. The circumstances of a life in full and a country in peril conspired to put Joe Biden at the center of an American reckoning, prompting an urgent appetite, at home and abroad, to divine what had made him, how he thought, what he carried, and what he lacked. At the very moment that his country was lying spread-eagled before the eyes of the world, Biden had arrived at his season of history. CHAPTER 1 Annus Horribilis The lush, well-to-do Wilmington suburbs, in the rolling woods of the Brandywine Valley, are popular with heirs to the chemical fortune of the du Pont family. Their estates and gardens are tucked away in what is known as Delaware's Chateau Country. On a modest patch, by those standards, Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, live on four sloping acres that overlook a small lake. On the ninety-ninth day before the election, I pulled into Biden's driveway. To avoid contagion, his advisers put me in a carriage house, a hundred yards from the home where the family lives. "Welcome to my mom's house," Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view. He reached the second floor of the cottage. He wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pen tucked between the buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask. Biden was three weeks away from becoming America's Democratic nominee for president. The headline on the front page of The Washington Post that morning was "America's Standing in the World Is at a Low Ebb." The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic was approaching 150,000, three times as many lives as America lost in Vietnam; the economy had crumbled faster than at any other time in the nation's history; in Portland, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked uniforms were tear-gassing protesters, whom Donald Trump called "sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators." On Twitter that day, Trump warned that the demonstrators would "destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn." Excerpted from Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now by Evan Osnos All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 Annus Horribilis | p. 5 |
Chapter 2 What It Took | p. 23 |
Chapter 3 "Grow Up" | p. 41 |
Chapter 4 Veep | p. 57 |
Chapter 5 Envoy | p. 75 |
Ckapter 6 The Lucky and the Unlucky | p. 99 |
Chapter 7 Battle for the Soul | p. 119 |
Chapter 8 Planning a Presidency | p. 143 |
Acknowledgments | p. 169 |
Note on Sources | p. 171 |