This cover picture, published by Gallery Books, features “Beautiful Things,” a memoir by Hunter Biden. Biden, son of President Joe Biden and a constant conservative target, published a memoir on April 6th. According to its publisher, the book will focus on the younger Biden’s well-publicized struggles with substance abuse.
Gallery book | AP
“Where’s Hunter?”
Apparently it will be on the shelves of your favorite bookstores in April.
Hunter Biden – President Joe Biden’s worried son – is due to publish a memoir this spring just months after Republicans desperately tried to turn his drug, booze, sexually reckless, and dubious business conduct into political poison for his father.
The book, entitled “Beautiful Things,” is said to deal with many of those ugly things in younger Biden’s life, according to a press release from Gallery Books, the Simon & Schuster masthead that publishes it.
The memoir was announced on Biden’s 51st birthday – and less than a month after his father took office.
“I come from a family marked by tragedy and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love,” he writes in the book, which the publication describes as “a deeply moving memory of addiction, loss and survival”.
Hunter Biden and his older brother Beau were both seriously injured as young children in a 1972 car crash that killed their mother Neilia and 1-year-old sister Naomi less than two months after Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate was from Delaware.
In his book, the press release states: “Hunter’s descent into substance abuse and his tortuous path to sobriety.”
While this suggests the final page will be a happy ending, the memoir comes out amid an ongoing deal for Biden that could lead to an unfortunate epilogue in later editions: a criminal tax investigation by federal prosecutors in his home state of Delaware.
Biden has denied any wrongdoing related to his taxes.
Hunter Biden and Ashley Biden arrive for the inauguration of their father Joe Biden as the 46th US President at the US Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2021.
Olivier Douliery | AFP | Getty Images
Such legal concerns have not detracted from praise for the book, which comes in the form of quotes from mega-selling horror author Stephen King, as well as authors Dave Eggers and Anne Lamott, upon release.
Eggers enthuses: “Beautiful things are so concise, so unshakable and driving that I couldn’t move between the first and last page without turning the pages and occasionally lifting my jaw off the floor.”
King, himself a recovering alcoholic, writes, “In AA we say that it doesn’t matter if you’re from Yale or jail, all addicts are equal. Hunter Biden proves that again in his harrowing and obsessively readable memoir anyone – including the son of a President of the United States – can ride the pink horse down Nightmare Alley. “
According to the publisher, Biden, who graduated from Yale Law School, actually begins his book by asking, “Where’s Hunter?”
This popular right wing catchphrase became a verbal expression of former President Donald Trump, his own son Donald Trump Jr. and a number of Trump supporters last fall.
Team Trump pretended that the media was paying more attention to Hunter Biden’s personal and financial history than voters would choose not to vote for his father on election day.
That story involves cocaine abuse, which in turn resulted in Hunter resigning as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, his wife starting dating his late brother’s widow, and denying, but ultimately under legal pressure, to admit that he had a child had marriage to a woman from Arkansas.
In 2019, in the midst of this paternity case, less than a week after they met, Biden impulsively married a young South African filmmaker, Melissa Cohen. The couple had a son named Beau in March 2020.
In addition to Biden’s complicated personal life, his business career has also created fear for his father, fodder for Republican conspiracy theories, and the seeds of Trump’s first impeachment.
During that career, Biden served as an attorney for one of his father’s largest political donors, a business consultant, lobbyist, investor, and board member of companies in Ukraine and China.
In the summer of 2019, Trump attempted to pressure the new President of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden and Joe Biden, who at the time were a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic President nomination.
Trump’s action, which came at the same time as he withheld Congress-approved military aid to Ukraine, resulted in his being indicted by the House of Representatives. Trump was later acquitted in a Senate trial.
Shortly before the 2020 elections, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani gave the New York Post a copy of a computer hard drive believed to belong to Hunter Biden, who allegedly left some computers at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, for one year.
The Post published a series of articles about the contents of this hard drive, which reportedly included information about business activities, personal emails, and photos.
Even after losing the election to Joe Biden, Trump continued to focus on using Hunter Biden to harm his father.
Trump even reportedly considered pressuring the Justice Department to appoint a special lawyer to investigate Hunter Biden’s taxes. But then Attorney General William Barr said he would not do this.
While the evidence in Biden’s tax case remains to be seen, the existence of his book proves that young dreams often die hard.
In the early 1990s, Biden applied for Syracuse University’s creative writing program after a 2019 profile from The New Yorker.
Hunter Biden was at the time a fan of the writers Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, both of whom had taught in Syracuse, and his “favorite novel at the time was” Post Office “according to Charles Bukowski’s debut magazine.
Bukowski’s first book, like his other autobiographical novels, openly and apologetically describes a life full of alcohol.
The magazine noted that “Hunter envisioned a more artistic career” than his brother Beau, whose advancement through the legal profession ended with becoming the Delaware Attorney General.
“He was considering getting a joint law degree in Syracuse,” the New York article reads.
“But with a baby on the way, he decided to go straight to law school.”
