Growing Up Biden
A Memoir
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- €12.99
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- €12.99
Publisher Description
**INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
A memoir from Valerie Biden Owens, Joe Biden’s younger sister, trusted confidante and lifelong campaign manager. Valerie, one of the first female campaign managers in United States history, writes of the role of family, faith, and fate in shaping her life, and the power of empathy and kindness in the face of turmoil and division.
Growing Up Biden details Valerie’s decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brother’s life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.
This memoir, full of candor and warmth, brings readers into the Biden home and shares stories from growing up in Delaware as the only daughter of the close-knit Irish Catholic family. Valerie writes in a compelling, relatable way about the challenges she faced breaking through gender barriers, the elusive nature of confidence, and navigating professional responsibilities while raising children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I'm not a political scientist, nor am I a policy wonk. However, I am an expert on Joe Biden," writes the president's younger sister in this touching account of life with her oldest sibling. Born in 1945, Biden Owens was close to Biden from a young age. "Our parents," she writes, "drilled it into our heads from birth that we were to take care of one another." This mentality helped them weather incredible losses, including the 1972 deaths of Biden's wife and daughter in a car accident. At the time, Biden Owens—who had just managed Biden's successful underdog U.S. Senate campaign—was an essential presence for her nephews, Beau and Hunter Biden, which enabled her brother to assume his duties and to go on to become Delaware's longest-serving senator. A key advisor to Biden throughout his political career, she details the guidance she offered him—"serv as his sounding board or gut check, and speak as a truth-teller"—while touching on familiar beats in the arc of Biden's career, including his first two presidential campaigns, and tenure as vice president. However, the best moments are Biden Owens's intimate recollections, such as her awkward first meeting with the future Jill Biden over a tuna salad lunch ("I gestured toward it, calling to her as if she were a scared cat"). Politics aside, this shines with heart and humanity.
