An ersatz Boston Brahmin

The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this autumn’s presidential election, it offers a cool (and at times almost chilling) assessment of the various episodes that have gone into the making of the career of the present junior senator from Massachusetts.

The perspective from which it is written is, it has to be said, predominantly a local one. All three authors are on the staff of the Boston Globe and, perhaps inevitably, they tend to assume a keener interest in the intricacies of politics as practised on Beacon Hill than is likely to prove to be the case, at least in this country. On the other hand, they have undeniably worked hard, relying for their research on a whole host of sources, including an eminent Austrian genealogist.