Joe Biden

The new biography of President Joe Biden by National Book Award winner and New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos has been recognized as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Guardian, and Daily Express. The Guardian describes it as "a thoroughly readable primer."

Biden has overcome unimaginable tribulations, multiple presidential primary humiliations, a potentially crippling speech impediment, and his own mediocrity. Now he carries the hopes of billions upon his shoulders, as noted by the Sunday Times. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest and the unluckiest man—fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses.

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 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.