'The Book of Joe' is newest guide to all things Biden

Malarkey and memes. Ice cream cones and finger guns. Sunglasses and Amtrak.

It's all in there.

While Joe Biden's new heart-tugging memoir "Promise Me, Dad" is on its way to being a bestseller, there's another more lighthearted book that has hit shelves in recent weeks: "The Book of Joe: The Life, Wit, and (Sometimes Accidental) Wisdom of Joe Biden" (Three Rivers Press, $18).

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Destined to be a First State stocking stuffer, the compact, 205-page book is mostly a glowing biography, bringing readers through his life starting with a stuttering Biden as a boy in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

But interspersed with the Biden bio are short, break-out boxes filled with what makes Biden so charming, whether its his boy-like love of ice cream and muscle cars or his old-school disposition, armed with words and phrases from a prior era, such as "malarkey" and "backbone like a ramrod."

So why release a book about a former vice president a full year after he left office? That's usually a recipe for naptime.

Author Jeff Wilser, who spent a year researching Biden and interviewing people in his universe, thinks the Delaware political heavyweight is even more popular now that Donald Trump and Mike Pence are in The White House.

"It's almost like America didn't really fully appreciate him until after he left," says Wilser, who previously penned last year's "Alexander Hamilton's Guide to Life." "It reminds you of an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend. After you break up, you realize, 'What a second. That was really good.' We kind of took him for granted during the White House years and there's a new appreciation for what a decent person he is.

"Especially in today's climate, I think we are hungry for people who are authentic, admirable, and this may sound kind of corny, but people who have really solid values."

The combination of Biden's deeply personal tragedies and his image as a lovable and generous everyman is what drew Wilser to Biden. After Biden lost his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, the former senator could have retreated into sullen sadness and stayed there. The same can be said for the time following the loss of his 46-year-old son Beau in 2015 to brain cancer.

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"The fact that he can still flash that smile and ham it up for a selfie -- there's a new weight to those moments. I respect him even more for having that goofball exterior," Wilser says. "It was hard earned."

Even though the book does touch on Biden's grief-stricken moments, it also revels in the fun side of the Biden persona. It's the character that has spawned endless memes, late night jokes and laugh-out-loud articles in the satirical newspaper The Onion.

For example, the second chapter of "The Book of Joe" is entitled "Hot Young Biden," a nod to the internet's collective freak-out last fall when a photo of a college-aged Biden made the rounds on social media, eliciting sexed-up responses such as, "I would text young Joe Biden at 1:27 a.m."

Wilser also surveys the internet's other Biden obsessions.

"My name is Joe Biden and I love ice cream," he quotes the vice president as saying at Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio. "You all think I'm kidding — I'm not. I eat more ice cream than three other people you'd like to be with, all at once."

We learn that Biden's favorite flavor is classic chocolate chip and White House videographer Arun Chaudhary tells Wilser that Biden's advance team would always bring him ice cream because they knew he loved it.

"It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent, like when someone knows you like cats and they keep buying you porcelain cats to put all over your home," Chaudhary says.

The book also details Biden's real life relationship with booze.

The Onion has referenced Biden drinking multiple times, including headlines such as "Biden Clenches Plastic Beer Cup In Teeth To Free Hands For Clapping." In doing so, the humor publication has cemented a fun-loving caricature of Biden as a beer-swilling renegade.

In fact, he's never had a beer in his life. As Wilser writes, alcoholism runs in Biden's family and after watching it take its toll with some, he stayed away. And that goes for cigarettes and marijuana as well, by the way. 

Apparently Biden does have a good sense of humor when it comes to his alter-ego, the cartoonish version of himself celebrated online.

Wilser write that Biden's daughter Ashley was the one to show Biden the bromance memes that surfaced last year, tweets and Instagram photos playing with the close relationship between Biden and President Obama.

"He sat there for an hour and laughed," Ashley is quoted as saying.

So which meme was Joe's favorite? It's one that shows the two about to hug.

Biden: "Doesn't this feel right?"

Obama: "Joe, I'm not leaving my wife for you."

Biden: "You said we'd be together forev--"

Obama: "Eight years. I said eight years."

"This book is very self-consciously a post-vice presidency, post-meme book. I wanted to attach it to the idea that a lot of Biden's appeal and place in the cultural conversation right now is, for better or worse, because of these Twitter feeds," Wilser says.

After a year of immersing himself in all things Biden, Wilser predicts that Biden will run and challenge President Trump in 2020 at the age of 78, which would make him the oldest person ever elected president behind Trump who was 70.

Not lost on Wilser is how it would be a full-circle moment for Biden, who was one of the youngest people ever elected to the U.S. Senate, entering the chamber in January 1973 at the minimum age of 30.

"He had to diffuse the age issue in that race and my theory is that Biden has a sense of irony and poetry," he says. "I can see him bookending his career with the age issue on both sides, young and old."

Contact Ryan Cormier of The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier), Twitter (@ryancormier) and Instagram (@ryancormier).