The Ugly Truths in Hunter Biden’s book ‘Beautiful Things’

The Ugly Truths in Hunter Biden’s book ‘Beautiful Things’

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This is one of the many takeaways from Hunter’s book ‘Beautiful Things’ that appears on Tuesday.

Many people have already decided on Hunter, and others do not want to know anymore, but I think his first-hand version of drug addiction, tabloid culture and political madness is incredibly informative. This is one of those stories that you “think you know, but you have no idea”. Hunter’s big salaries to sit on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma? He reveals that ‘Burisma’ has become a major asset to his ‘steepest addiction’ by providing cash for all the crack cocaine.

This is not the way we read about a child of the president. Hunter’s versions of drunken flexibility and crisp fresh oesys are downright narrow. And his memories of his brother – “wish you could know Beau” – are sad.

So far, most book reviews have been fairly positive. Publishers Weekly says its “courageous self-esteem makes the despair of drug abuse devastatingly palpable.” Books Mark has other reviews here. Like the Seija Rankin of Entertainment Weekly, I was struck by the scenes his father was involved in: “The result is, purposefully or not, a portrait of our current president as the ultimate patriarch.”
It’s also a portrayal of addiction as ‘really the biggest equalizer in this country’, as CNN’s Kate Bennett told me after we both read the book. “This is the one thing that really got President Biden on his knees.” Read Bennett’s review here.

“Where’s Hunter?”

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

But the investigation into what pro-Trump media scribes sometimes call the ‘Biden crime family’ continues to this day, and Hunter admits it in the book. Regarding his Burisma role, which was at the heart of President Trump’s first indictment, he wrote: “I have done nothing unethical, and have never been charged with wrongdoing. In our current political environment, I do not believe that ‘ would make a difference if I took that seat or not.I would be attacked anyway.What I believe in this current climate is that it will not matter what I did or not.The attacks were not meant for me was meant to hurt my father. ‘Yet he says, looking back, for optical reasons, he would not take the board again.

Here’s where Hunter is

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

Later this week, Hunter is on the BBC and on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”, but he seems to be avoiding more open political and partisan spaces. Fox talks about him almost every hour, but there’s no word of a Hunter book interview on Fox, and I do not think there will be either.

After the CBS interviews, “Beautiful Things” breaks out in the top 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

Shine a light

Hunter told Scott Simon of the NPR that “the reason I wrote the book” is that it will hopefully give some people hope. Give them hope that they do not have to stay locked up in that prison. And I do not just mean the people who sit at the bottom of the pit like I do, but the people who stand at the top of the pit and realize that unless we go down with the lantern, he will never find his way out. But it is a darkness and a dangerous journey for them. And that was for my family. But their light never sought me. Never a moment, never a moment that they are not trying to save me. ‘

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