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In this March 13, 2017 file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during an event to formally launch the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.Patrick Semansky/The Associated Press

The political memoir is the 98-pound weakling of American literature – 98 pounds because these volumes, almost always overwritten, seem to weigh that much in the hand, and weaklings because they are almost always so turgid that they're even more a challenge to read than they must have been to write.

Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush wrote memoirs that each weighed in at exactly 512 pages–perhaps some kind of magic number of forgettable prose. Ms. Clinton's was memorable for about three paragraphs of description of a controversial, deadly episode at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and for her glittery praise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade pact she later repudiated under campaign pressure. And Mr. Bush's effort? It won a big cash advance but almost no readers.

Joe Biden's memoir is of a different genus and species altogether. For one thing, it checks in at a mere 260 pages, a deceptive figure because the book's dimensions are undersized, the margins are huge and the space between the lines yawn almost as wide as the former vice-president's toothy smile. Let's stipulate from the start that its brevity is an advantage. Promise Me, Dad is not as brief as a Trump tweet but it packs the same kind of punch, though from the left instead of the right.

Its power comes from the punch in the gut at the centre of the Biden story – actually a one-two punch, the first one being the tragic death of his wife and daughter only weeks after his election to the Senate in 1972, and the second after the death of cancer of his promising-politician son almost a half-century later.

So while you may think of Mr. Biden – a chronic talkaholic prone to gaffes and the how-ya-doin'-pal school of rope-line politics – as the happy warrior of U.S. political life, there is a deep stream of sadness in him. It wells up into the spare pages of this memoir, unforgettably in this gush of grief from his diary marking the death of Beau Biden at age 46:

"May 30. 7:51 p.m. It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy." A few pages later, comes the sort of reflection that sometimes is thrown into political memoirs to add a sprinkle of humanity to the dull pages – but that, in Mr. Biden's case, are genuine and completely unforced:

"I have come to understand that nobody can take away all the pain, no matter how close. There are times when each of us must bear the burden of loss alone, and in his or her own way. The people who really understand that are the people carrying those burdens, too."

These moments of regret and reflection are the main currents of this memoir, which skips briskly through his career in the Senate – breathes there another soul who spent nearly four decades on Capitol Hill who wouldn't punish the rest of us with his lengthy recollections of his role in the House-Senate conference committee on the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia? – and focuses mainly on his years as Barack Obama's understudy.

Here, Mr. Biden occasionally slips into the kind of insider account that's of interest only to the principals, who in any case only pick up these sorts of volumes at the booksellers during their Washington lunch hour and search for their names in the index rather than actually buy it or, heaven forfend, read it. But Mr. Biden's lapses into this genre are brief and on occasion help flesh out our view of Mr. Obama, who emerges from these pages with a warmth we seldom saw on cable.

One of Mr. Biden's predecessors in the vice-presidency, John Nance Garner, a salty Texan who was Franklin Roosevelt's first running mate, described the job as not being "worth a pitcher of warm piss." A Texan of more refined sensibilities, George H. W. Bush, said his years as Ronald Reagan's understudy could be summarized as a series of overseas funerals. "You die," he said, "I fly." Mr. Biden did his share of funerals as well, though his were mostly domestic. "I have found over the years that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss." All this is from the painful passages he has endured. "When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience," he writes. "They know I have a sense of the depth of their pain."

What screams from these pages are not the negotiations in foreign lands, nor his agony over whether to challenge Ms. Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, nor even the way he artfully nudged Mr. Obama to embrace same-sex marriage. It is, instead, the primal scream of the inspiration he drew from the courage of his son, the debilitation he felt from the struggle of his son, and the devastation he felt from the death of his son. The result is a searing book that is both a memoir of Joe Biden's life and a meditation on life itself.

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