The new biography of President Joe Biden by National Book Award winner and New Yorker staff
writer Evan Osnos - A Financial Times Guardian and Daily Express Book of the Year 'A
thoroughly readable primer' Guardian 'Biden has overcome unimaginable tribulation multiple
presidential primary humiliations a potentially crippling speech impediment and his own
mediocrity. Now he carries the hopes of billions upon his shoulders' Sunday Times 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 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. His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for
others in hardship - an essential quality as he addresses a nation at its most dire hour in
decades. Blending up-close journalism and broader context Evan Osnos illuminates Biden's life
and captures the characters and meaning of an extraordinary presidential election. He draws 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
progressive activists advisers opponents and Biden family members. 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.
