I read books by US presidents (at least the last two) so I was going to get to the new guy eventually. My expectations were not terribly high for this book but I was surprised at how much I liked it compared to other political biographies.
With that said, I found the first part of the book documenting Biden’s early days pretty corny. More than a few times, when reading about how Young Joe confronted the poolyard gangster after work or when he went home after meeting his future wife for the first time and told his family he’d met the woman he’d marry, I found myself rolling my eyes and putting the book down. “Really, Joe? You did that? Wow…”. We get this image of a small town Scranton boy with big dreams and it just screams “I am running for political office”.
The book does get a lot better when Biden is elected to the senate though and I feel the subjects he deals with are much better framed. We do get a sense of the changing times with older segregationist voices still present in the Senate and how Senators of the time managed to interact with each other civilly while still pushing forward their individual manifestos. Biden is clearly focused on foreign affairs from his early career and his personal interactions with Marshall Tito and Slobodan Milosevic offer an interesting perspective of the US intervention in the Bosnian War.
My favorite part of reading US presidential biographies are when they give appraisals of other presidents. I doubt they give completely honest opinions (especially seeing as this book was written just before Biden’s 2008 campaign) but the insights are interesting nonetheless. As Biden had met face to face with 5 presidents at that point, he does have some amusing anecdotes. His first conversations with George W. Bush are especially entertaining.
Overall, you get a sense that Biden’s been around for a long time. I do think it was a good book and worthy of a read if you’re interested in the types of people who manage the world.
