Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency

like the large print, but also makes it a bigger book

Of the book's 413 pages of text, remove the two containing a description of Donald Trump's presidency and you're left with what to this point is the best analysis I've read of how Joe Biden managed to get elected. The authors give us insight into Biden's inner circle and reveal a savvy deftness and cunning that is often glossed over by the overstated narrative that "he's too old to be president." Most valuably, they carefully examine how other centrist Democratic hopefuls dropped out of the 2020 primary when they saw no clear path to victory and realized that Biden was their best hope - in their estimation for the good of the country - to defeat Trump. Unfortunately, a book that otherwise would've been a masterpiece is tainted by a reckless presentation of opinion, conjecture, and speculation clothed as fact that, unfortunately, if in circulation in the distant future, readers who weren't born in 2021 or were too young to remember may reasonably infer from the sloppy language that Trump actually ordered his supporters to physically seize the U.S. Capitol and overthrow democracy, that he explicitly extorted a foreign leader by withholding important foreign aid so that the latter would investigate Trump's potential political rival's son, and other such highly debated (and highly debatable) contentions. In my own book Trumped-Up Charges!, I've gone to great lengths to put what Trump did or didn't say or do under a microscope in order to separate fact from opinion; unfortunately, these authors didn't do that. But their book isn't about Trump, it's about how Biden won. And that topic, they covered commendably.

Unfortunately, this (USA) Democracy needs more than just luck. It needs a population interested in keeping democracy alive and well. "A republic, if you can keep it."

Bought this for my husband, the family political junkie, and he loves it.

An excellent insightful read.