MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Kushner has written (to the extent that he actually wrote it himself) a terrible book, but one not necessarily worse than those regularly written by upper-level bureaucrats without storytelling abilities or intellectual interests. \'The story that follows is not your typical White House memoir\', Kushner declares at the outset, in one of the first of many laughable conceits ... a public relations exercise meant to enshrine the importance, diligence and success of its author and subject, the former president’s son-in-law and most-important adviser. It is a book that only the author himself could truly like (and pleasing the author is a ghostwriter’s first responsibility). Such books exist as perks of, or finishing touches to, government service, a line on a résumé, an addition to a personal library (not infrequently a one-book library) and a calling card that can be pleasantly inscribed – say, to Gulf sovereign wealth fund investors. It is a genre of book usually and graciously ignored by the wider world, rather than pilloried. What is at issue, in other words, is not the book: it is the man ... In a way Breaking History is emblematic of one of the traits that have so infuriated so many since Kushner stepped out of his hermetic Manhattan social world to become a major political presence: the tone-deafness with which he has carried on his astonishing ascent. At least his father-in-law never presumed to want respectability. Kushner, on the other hand, during his four years in the White House, seemed in a constant state of woundedness that he wasn’t adequately appreciated for, as he outlines in his book, his sagacity, maturity, forbearance, statesmanlike mien and interests, and eye on the long game. He may have had a point about the long game ... Amid the self-serving malarkey, first-person hogging of the central stage and execrable prose, Kushner’s book seems to have three key purposes. The first is to assign blame for his bad press and worse reputation ... I can offer a catalogue of Kushner’s breathtaking, preposterous revisions ... Everything about his life and career defies normal, meritocratic, political, even ideological sense – he is just not a serious or even plausible figure. In Breaking History he has done little or nothing to dispel the transparently obvious fact that he is unprepared, entitled and hideously opportunistic (even in an age of shameless opportunism), and nor, it seems, has he really bothered even to try to. (Instead he guilelessly outlines his career of overt and intensive social climbing.) But however improbable he might be, his eye is always on the prize.
Evan Osnos
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... it’s refreshing—even cleansing—to be here again, to read an admiring biography about a normal politician. Of course it is dull too ... Here we see the journalist in sync with the aspirations and craft of the politician, admiring, often in awe of, his subject’s driving ambition to rise in the political structure, and his skills in accomplishing this. There isn’t, traditionally, much of an ideological basis to such political portraiture. All winners are due their attentive books, and such special-access tracts (Osnos is granted quite a bit of one-on-one time with Biden the candidate) tend to be produced by those who have shown their relative deference. Only the most gullible reader might miss the clear partnership between the politician and political writer in a traditional campaign biography ... Osnos is an old-fashioned political writer ... Osnos the younger is not setting out to look for deficiencies or expose scandal but to set out virtues. And not, mind you, ideological virtues but political ones: his subject’s astuteness, acumen and fortune as a politician ... Osnos’s lacklustre prose suggests he didn’t know he had such a big story, even as Biden began to prosper in the primaries, and in fact there is a sense of the author feeling somewhat lumbered with the Biden beat. His subject emerges as a worthy but default figure, the best all-purpose, anybody-but-Trump candidate.
