President-elect 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 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. 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 on 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.