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

“Highly readable and insightful.” —Financial Times, “The 10 Books to Read Ahead of the Ballot in November”

Now updated with new material for the historically significant 2024 election—a concise, “comprehensive and compelling” (The Washington Post) examination of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s vision of the presidency by journalist and National Book Award winner Evan Osnos

President Joe Biden 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.

Yet even as Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a rare willingness 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 belief that he is underestimated by pundits and opponents—an essential piece of his rationale for running in 2024, despite deep troubles domestically and abroad.

Blending up-close journalism and broader context, award-winning author Evan Osnos draws on a decade of reporting on Biden for The New Yorker to capture the extraordinary presidential election of 2020—and includes up-to-date new insights as Biden faces reelection in 2024. Based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including former President Barack Obama, and a range of activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members, this portrayal illuminates Biden’s eventful career in the Senate, his eight years as Obama’s vice president, his political sojourn after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his choice of Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate, and his decision to square off once more against Donald Trump.

Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden faces in his presidency 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 era in history.