Book Summary and Reviews of Beautiful Things by Hunter Biden

Beautiful Things by Hunter Biden

Beautiful Things

A Memoir

by Hunter Biden

  • Published:
  • Apr 2021, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

"I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love," Hunter Biden writes in this deeply moving and "unflinchingly honest" (Entertainment Weekly) memoir of addiction, loss, and survival.

When he was two years old, Hunter Biden was badly injured in a car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. In 2015, he suffered the devastating loss of his beloved big brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer at the age of forty-six. These hardships were compounded by the collapse of his marriage and a years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction.

In Beautiful Things—"an astonishingly candid and brave book about loss, human frailty, wayward souls, and hard-fought redemption" (Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author)—Hunter recounts his descent into substance abuse and his tortuous path to sobriety. The story ends with where Hunter is today—a sober married man with a new baby, finally able to appreciate the beautiful things in life.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Sometimes moving, sometimes funny, often horrifying, thoroughly heartfelt, and believable." —Kirkus Reviews

"The book is equal parts family saga, grief narrative and addict's howl." —The New York Times

"His journey is…deeply relatable for others living with addiction." —USA Today

"…a memoir at once harrowing, relentless and a determined exercise in trying to seize his own narrative from the clutches of the Republicans and the press." —The Washington Post

"This is an astonishingly candid and brave book about loss, human frailty, wayward souls and hard-fought redemption. Beautiful Things is so concise, so unflinching and propulsive, that outside of turning the pages and occasionally picking my jaw off the ground, I didn't move between the first page and the last." —Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of The Circle and The Captain and the Glory

"Beautiful Things, Hunter Biden's devastating memoir, covers much ground, but at its core is an addict's journey—from the first stolen sips of alcohol in a childhood marked by great loss, to the grim purgatory and lethal despair of late-stage crack addiction. With disarming humility and candor, Hunter's unflinching account lays bare both the sustaining power and hard limits of love and family." —Bill Clegg, New York Times bestselling author of The End of the Day and Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

This information about Beautiful Things was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Hunter Biden

Hunter Biden is a lawyer and an artist. A graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, Hunter has worked as an advocate on behalf of Jesuit universities, and served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards, including as vice chairman of Amtrak and chairman of the board of World Food Program USA. The son of Joe and Jill Biden, Hunter is the father of three daughters: Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy. He lives with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and their son, Beau, in California.

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Read-Alikes

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