The Ugly Truths in Hunter Biden’s Book of Beautiful Things

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That’s one of the many takeaways from Hunter’s book “Beautiful Things,” out Tuesday.

Many people have already made up their minds about Hunter, and others don’t want to know more, but I think his first-hand account of drug addiction, tabloid culture, and political madness is incredibly informative. It’s one of those “you think you know, but you have no idea” kinds of stories. For example, Hunter’s big salary for sitting on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma? He reveals that “Burisma has become a major driver” of his “steepest slipping addiction” by providing cash for all crack cocaine.

This is not the way we are used to reading about a child of the president. Hunter’s stories of drunken benders and squatted odysseys are nothing short of terrifying. And his memories of his brother – “I wish you could have known Beau” – are sad.

Most book reviews so far have been quite positive. Publishers Weekly says his “courageous self-assessment makes the despair of substance abuse devastatingly palpable.” Books Mark has other reviews here. Like Entertainment Weekly’s Seija Rankin, I was struck by the scenes involving his father: “The result is, purposefully or not, a portrait of our current president as the ultimate patriarch.”
It also portrays addiction as “really the great equalizer in this country,” as CNN’s Kate Bennett told me after we both read the book. “It’s the one thing that really brought President Biden to his knees.” Read Bennett’s review here.

“Where’s Hunter?”

Chapter after chapter, the “Where’s Hunter?” stumble into a whole new context. Some of the book’s drivers, such as Stephen King, have appropriated it to promote Beautiful Things. King wrote, “Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and the beautiful.”

But the scrutiny of what pro-Trump media screamers sometimes call the “Biden crime family” continues to this day, and Hunter acknowledges in the book. Speaking of his role in Burisma, which was at the heart of President Trump’s first impeachment, he writes, “I have not done anything unethical and have never been charged with misconduct. In our current political environment, I don’t believe it would make any difference if I took that chair or not I was going to be attacked anyway What I do believe, in this current climate, is that it doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t do The attacks weren’t meant for me Were meant to injure my father. “Still, in retrospect, he says, for optical reasons, that he would no longer be on the board.

Here’s where Hunter is

Hunter appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning”, then on Monday on “CBS This Morning” and on NPR’s “Morning Edition”. He also recorded an in-depth interview for Marc Maron’s podcast. Maron said in his intro that he saw Hunter as “a whipboy by the right-wing press” and was not very interested in talking to him. But then he read the book and wondered what it’s like to be caricatured and demonized: “How does a person, let alone a drug addict trying to stay clean, deal with that?”

Later this week, Hunter will be on the BBC and “Jimmy Kimmel Live”, but he seems to avoid more overtly political and partisan spaces. Fox talks about him practically every hour, but there is no report from a Hunter book interview about Fox, and I don’t think it will.

After the CBS interviews, “Beautiful Things” broke into the top 10 of Amazon’s bestsellers list.

Shine a light

Hunter told NPR’s Scott Simon that “really the reason I wrote the book” is that “it will hopefully give some people hope. Give them some hope that they don’t have to stay locked up in that prison. And I don’t mean that alone. the people who are stuck at the bottom of the well like I was, but the people who are at the top of that well and realize that unless we go down with the lantern, it will never find its way out. “A dangerous journey for them. And it was for my family. But their light never sought me out. Never a moment, never a moment when they didn’t try to save me.”

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