107 days

"I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win," recollects former vice president Harris (The Truths We Hold) in this candid, blame-casting memoir of her failed 2024 presidential run. She opens with the surprise call from President Biden informing her he'd be dropping out, which not only disrupted "Sunday pancakes" with her grandnieces but also thrust her into "the shortest campaign in modern presidential history." Her day-by-day account of rallies, endorsements, TV appearances, podcasts, and ad buys amounts to a fairly sharp tell-all, with cringey moments including Biden's inopportune pre-debate call to relay that some Philadelphia bigwigs "were not going to support me because I'd been saying bad things about him" and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's overconfident conversation with her Naval Observatory residence manager about "how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists' work on loan" once he became vice president. She's especially forthcoming about her "complicated" relationship with Biden and his inner circle, who she feels didn't promote her. However, beyond brief moments of defensiveness on flashpoints like Gaza protesters ("Why weren't they protesting at Trump rallies?") and the frequency of Liz Cheney's stumping for her ("exaggerated" by the media), Harris sidesteps consideration of her own missteps, chalking her loss up to the lack of time to connect with voters. This rehash is rich in intraparty sniping, but short on campaign postmortem. (Sept.)