Joe Biden: The Life, the Presidency, and What Matters Now

by Evan Osnos Narrated by Evan Osnos, David Remnick

Overview

*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.

The audiobook includes Evan Osnos's conversation with David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A beautifully written short volume.” —Financial Times, Best Books of 2020

“[From] an immensely talented reporter for The New Yorker, Joe Biden ably takes the measure of the man and the politician, presenting a picture of the Democratic nominee that is in a few ways unexpected.” —The Washington Post

“It is impossible to come away from Osnos’s biography without a sense of awe at what Biden has overcome to arrive at this point.” —The Guardian

“Osnos draws on his years covering Biden for The New Yorker to provide a rich narrative for the former vice president’s life.” —The National Book Review

“[A] probing but sympathetic biographical sketch, drawing on vivid reportage from his New Yorker profiles [and] shrewd analysis, the result is a portrait of the candidate that’s smart and evocative.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] solid foundation for evaluating one of the most important figures in American governance.” —Booklist

“Reading Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, a slim but comprehensive and compelling book by the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, has only strengthened my positive impression of the Democratic nominee.” —Max Boot, The Washington Post

“If you need a rapid and readable Biden briefing, it’s for you.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Explores the journey that President Biden has taken to get to the White House for a second time, while outlining the prospects of what the Biden presidency will mean for the country.” —Rolling Stone

“This biography covers the candidate’s career as a senator and vice president as well as his life on the campaign trail.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Evan Osnos reveals how Biden’s trials and tribulations have forged in him an uncommon empathy.” —Detroit Free Press

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177738611
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	914,350

Read an Excerpt

Prologue Prologue
February 12, 1988

A forty-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 headaches had continued.

The man heaved himself onto the bed. From there, his assistant got him to a plane to Delaware, where doctors 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. “President,” 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.

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