The Ugly Truths of Hunter Biden’s Book “Beautiful Things”

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This is one of the many takeaways from Hunter’s book, “Beautiful Things,” which comes out Tuesday.

A lot of people have already decided on Hunter and others aren’t interested in knowing anything else, but I think his first-hand account of drug addiction, tabloid culture, and political madness is incredibly informative. It’s one of those stories that “you think you know, but you have no idea.” For example, Hunter’s large salaries to be on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma? It reveals that “Burisma became a major facilitator” of its “strongest addiction skid” by providing cash for all crack cocaine.

This is not the way we are used to reading about a president’s son. Hunter’s accounts of drunken folders and crack-fed odysseys are frankly terrifying. And his memories of his brother – “I wish you could meet Beau” – are sad.

So far most of the book reviews have been pretty positive. Publishers Weekly says its “brave self-assessment makes the despair of substance abuse palpable.” Books Mark has other reviews here. Like Entertainment Weekly’s Seija Rankin, I was struck by the scenes involving her father: “The result is, purposefully or not, a portrait of our current president as the final patriarch.”
It’s also a portrait of addiction as “really the great equalizer in this country,” as Kate Bennett of CNN told me after we both read the book. “It’s the only thing that really got President Biden on his knees.” Read Bennett’s assessment here.

“Where’s Hunter?”

Chapter after chapter puts “Where’s the hunter?” entering a whole new context. Some of the book’s proponents, such as Stephen King, have appropriated 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 scrutiny over what the pro-Trump media cries sometimes call the “Biden crime family” continues to this day, and Hunter acknowledges it in the book. Regarding his role as Burisma, which was the center of President Trump’s first removal, he writes: “I did nothing ethical and I have never been accused of wrongdoing. In our current political environment, I don’t think “It doesn’t matter if I took that seat or not. I’d be attacked anyway. What I think, in this current climate, is that it wouldn’t matter what I did or not. The attacks weren’t meant for me. They were meant to hurt the my father “. However, he says, in retrospect, for optical reasons, he would not return to the board position.

This is where Hunter is

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

Later this week, Hunter will be on the BBC and on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” but it looks like he’s avoiding more overtly political and partisan spaces. Fox talks about it pretty much every hour, but there’s no interview of a Hunter book on Fox, nor do I think there is.

After CBS interviews, “Beautiful Things” entered the top 10 of Amazon’s bestseller list.

Shining a light

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

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