The prodigal son
From childhood trauma to adult infamy and endless rehab visits, Hunter Biden tells his often harrowing but ultimately uplifting story.
From childhood trauma to adult infamy and endless rehab visits, Hunter Biden tells his often harrowing but ultimately uplifting story.
As the second son of the US President, Hunter Biden has never been far from the headlines. Born into privilege and inseparable from his brother, Beau, he had an idyllic childhood (notwithstanding the car wreck that claimed their mother and baby sister), often roaming the Senate’s corridors when their father went to Washington. They had it all, but when Beau died of brain cancer, Hunter lost his moorings and entered a life consumed with controversy and addiction. The drink. The drugs. The US$80,000-a-month fee from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. The romantic tryst with Beau’s widow. The lurid contents found on his abandoned laptop. It all begs the question: what are we to make of Hunter Biden?
In his memoir, Beautiful Things (Simon & Schuster, $37.99), Biden does his best to explain himself. Still traumatised so obviously by Beau’s demise, he dedicates the first 45 pages to the harrowing diagnosis, treatment, death, funeral and eulogies from the great and the good.
He also recounts the beginning of his serious spiral into hell but, fortuitously, not before, as a functioning alcoholic, stitching up the “very attractive” Burisma deal. The “robust compensation”, he believes, enabled him and it contributed to his descent into “chain-smoking” crack and scoring drugs down squalid alleys in his Porsche. “Non-stop depravity,” he calls it. There were non-stop rehabs, too, always ending in relapse. He’s now newly married and-addiction free. Undoubtedly a beautiful thing. Long may it last. JB
On a camping trip to Wales with her daughter in August 2020, Catherine Green chatted to a passer-by as she waited for their dinner outside a pizza van. As her dinner began to congeal on the counter, Green listened to the woman’s fears about Covid-19 vaccines. “I worry about what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don’t trust them. They don’t tell us the truth.”
Green broke it to her new friend: “I am them. It’s me and my team, in my lab, who physically made [the Oxford-AstraZeneca
vaccine]. We ordered the ingredients, we made the first batch. I know exactly what’s in it and you can ask me anything you like.”
It was this conversation, Green says, that inspired her to write VAXXERS (Hodder & Stoughton, $37.99), which is nothing less than an insider’s view of the biggest science story of the decade. She takes it in turns to write chapters with her colleague Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford University, recently made a dame for her work on the vaccine.
There is so much that is refreshing about this book. Somehow I can’t see Jonas
Salk (of polio vaccine fame) comparing a vaccine to sourdough, or explaining that early tests are like “a dressmaker making a muslin of a couture garment. Before cutting into the expensive material, she will make several versions in a cheap fabric to check the fit.” The two women explain the craft and torture of making a great vaccine as if confiding to a friend. They also stress not their own genius but their fears and frustrations: funding nightmares, running out of fridge space at the lab, the family they haven’t seen for months. They cycle to work when the puddles haven’t iced over; Gilbert’s house becomes infested with wasps. Wonderful in its own right, but also, as it was designed so compassionately to be, a reassuring read for the “vaccine-hesitant”. JN
For years, award-winning journalist Katie Engelhart travelled the world talking to hundreds of people involved in assisted dying. She interviewed patients, doctors, researchers, advocates and opponents. She met elderly, lawabiding folk who, because they didn’t meet the criteria for physician-assisted death, either ordered lethal drugs on the internet or slipped over the US-Mexico border to personally collect their life-ending concoctions. She discovered clandestine, highly organised internet groups called the “euthanasia underground” and she listened closely to the “slippery slope” argument hauled out by sceptics who believed that once a limited “right to die” was granted (as it increasingly has been around the world), the law would expand to include more and more categories of patients who were not terminally ill: “The sick but not dying,” writes Engelhart in THE INEVITABLE (Allen & Unwin, $32.99). “The mentally but not physically ill. The old. The paralysed. The weak. The disabled.” There is not an angle or corner unexamined in this red-hot topic.
Engelhart puts together a collection of six personal stories: two are about doctors – Lonny Shavelson, a Californian physician, and Australian Philip Nitschke, who lost his medical licence after teaching people how to “exit” at “DIY death” seminars. The other four chapters belong to ordinary people who, for various reasons, either found or seek dignity in dying at the end of their lives. A profoundly moving book by a fabulous, fearless writer. It is timely for this country, as the End of Life Choice Act 2019 will take effect on November 7 this year. JB
Ella Al-Shamahi is an explorer, evolutionary biologist and stand-up comic who thinks that Neanderthals shook hands just like we do. If this seems not only unlikely but impossible to prove, she is on surprisingly firm ground. In her book, HANDSHAKE (Profile Books, $24.99), she postulates that the handshake is at least seven million years old, older than our species. Chimps shake hands (or rather, fingers) in friendly greeting. And if related species exhibit a behaviour, “we tend to assume that the last common ancestor of those species also exhibited that behaviour”. So, despite the absence of the handshake in ancient cave art, our hairy non-human ancestors may well have sealed things with a handshake.
This pleasant book, about a widely shared human trait most of us seldom think about, is given extra interest by Al-Shamahi’s obsession with handshakes for much of her life. “I know the value of the handshake because I have lived with it and I have lived without it: for the first 26 years of my life – what I affectionately call my fundamentalist period – I followed strict Muslim law. It was awkward, and the tactics I adopted to avoid shaking men’s hands in the UK in the noughties ranged from the ingenious to the ludicrous.” Apparently, “handshake dodgeball tactics” are a common topic in devout circles.
Al-Shamahi thinks the handshake’s deep lineage will help it survive even a pandemic such as SARSCoV-2. “If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s that touch really matters – and our impulse to do it likely comes from deep within our DNA. As a basic unit of touch, nothing works as well as the handshake.” JN l