Beautiful Things: A Memoir
(Gallery, $28)
Hunter Biden, at
51, “has not lost his knack for getting tangled up in messes,” said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Even his decision to release a memoir about his crack addiction at the start of his father’s presidency “seemed like another bad calculation,” and in the related TV interviews, the younger Biden seems to be ducking responsibility for other mistakes. But the book, “ineffably sad and beautifully written,” makes a case for itself, because it “tears the tabloid face off the story about an American family that has experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.” Hunter lost his mother and an infant sister in a 1972 car crash. He lost his soulmate brother to cancer in 2015. And when he writes about losing himself to addiction, “the details are wrenching, proving that drugs can drag anyone down.”
Hunter Biden isn’t just a tragic figure, though; “he’s also a terrible person,” said Maureen Callahan in the New York Post. Besides pocketing riches from China and Ukraine justified only by his father’s standing, he cheated on his wife with hookers and even his dead brother’s wife—while impregnated a stripper on the side. Though he’s stuffed his memoir with sordid lows, including weeks-long crack binges, he provides only a bland exculpatory chapter on why he was worth $50,000 a month to a Ukrainian gas company. But coming clean is “clearly not why this book exists.” Perhaps Hunter needed money. Perhaps, though, he wanted to call out his father for checking out when his young boys most needed him, then for favoring Beau.
Joe Biden comes off fine here: loyal to Hunter during the dark times while actively trying to help, said Marianne SzegedyMaszak in The Washington Post. But Hunter can’t teach anyone how to beat addiction, because he tamed his only after meeting his current wife, a woman bent on cleaning him up. Besides, he exhibits “a continuous blind spot” for the pain he causes others, said Lloyd Green in TheGuardian .com. In this case, “confession should not be conflated with self-awareness.”