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Bottom of the pile
17
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
17/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Evan Osnos
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
October 27, 2020
Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiestâfortunate 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. Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden will face if elected and weighs how political circumstances, and changes in the candidate's thinking, have altered his positions
What The Reviewers Say
The book is an easy read and contains a number of insights — though it’s still a quickie book.
Osnos’s concise biography treads back along the trail of horrendous tragedies, dashed hopes and dramatic implosions that preceded Biden’s improbable third run at the presidency, and gives at least some clues to the kind of leader he will become if he wins.
... it’s refreshing—even cleansing—to be here again, to read an admiring biography about a normal politician. Of course it is dull too.
There’s something deeper going on here. It seems that many liberal journalists in America no longer see it as their duty to ask tough questions, if there’s any chance of them rebounding to Trump’s benefit. They believe too much is at stake. Perhaps they are right, but it doesn’t make for compelling journalism. In this case, the result is 190 pages of eloquent and well-informed puffery that effectively doubles up as a campaign advert..
