Released late last month, Kamala Harris’ book, “107 Days,” is a recounting of the three and a half months she had to separate herself from the increasingly unpopular then-President Biden and prove herself to the American people to be a more competent, capable leader than Donald Trump in the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history. The book offers a play-by-play of the arduous efforts made by Harris and her team to create a successful campaign, as well as Harris’s reflections on why she believes she ultimately failed.

The book is formatted as a nerve-racking countdown to Election Day, with each chapter being one less day to win over the middle-class vote, catapulting the reader back into the amplified political discourse and tension that dominated the summer and autumn of 2024. As I read, I was frequently reminded of the whirlwind of emotions I had experienced and the debates and discussions that were had with family and friends surrounding the two candidates.

A fair amount of content could have been cut. Some portions of the book were dull and felt frivolous, such as a five-sentence chapter for September 29 that reads almost like a “to-do” list. A brief anecdote about how she and Doug Emhoff came to be married also seemed out of place.

Harris, much like she did during her campaign, attempts to connect with her readers by enacting a populist appeal. She speaks of her immigrant parents, who entered America with no connections; only a fervent desire to continue their college education and take advantage of the opportunities not available to them in their home countries. She shares how she and her younger sister, Maya, were raised primarily by their hard-working, South Asian mother. Harris’ father was present throughout their childhood, but it was primarily her mother who instilled in them strength and compassion for the disenfranchised. Harris recalls how she “sweated all over” McDonald’s deep fryers in her teenage years, unlike Trump, who “got handed $413 million from his daddy.”

Without knowing the full extent of Harris’ upbringing, a reader might find themselves relating to her middle-class narrative and the hardships that come along with it. However, Harris fails to mention that the majority of her adolescence was spent comfortably in Westmount, Quebec, one of the wealthiest cities in Canada. And though she acknowledged her mother was a breast cancer researcher at several universities, and her father was an economist who taught at Stanford University, she discounts the economic privilege that this brought her. I was left wishing she had been more authentic in this regard.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Harris’ autobiography is her unrestrained critiques of Biden and his staff, who questioned her loyalty to the administration when Biden’s cognitive decline was becoming more apparent to the public after his first debate with Trump, claiming to have “finally beat Medicare” following a string of incoherent sentences.

In the fourth chapter, a few days after he had dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, Biden addressed the nation from the White House and didn’t mention Harris until nine minutes into the eleven-minute speech, only to briefly thank her for her work as Vice President. “I am a loyal person,” Harris writes bitingly. Harris makes several remarks about Biden’s staff’s failure to support her during her campaign, noting they did little to squash untrue rumors surrounding her, saying they thought she should be “knocked down a little more.”

She uses these incidents to dive into the qualms she’s seemingly had for years with the Biden Administration, namely their keeping her and her accomplishments under wraps for so long, including her successful diplomatic efforts with countries in Central America. Harris believes the lack of promotion throughout her four years as Vice President contributed to her loss, arguing that she did not have enough time to distinguish her politics from Biden’s.

While there is a fair amount of blame placing, which at times felt excessive, I appreciate the accountability she took in the book for not doing more to distinguish herself from Biden. On the 106th day before the election, Harris had her campaign rollout. “I spent the first third of my remarks effusively praising him [Biden] before I launched into my own campaign speech. I would do that for several weeks until my campaign strategists urged me to stop…”, she writes, with David Plouffe putting it to her straight, “People hate Joe Biden.”

Still, she struggled to do so, reflecting on a difficult interview she had on “The View”; when one interviewer asked Harris what she would have done differently than Biden over the past four years, she famously replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” The backlash was immediate, as Trump’s political advertisers jumped to use her words against her. “Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?” She writes in frustration, now understanding how detrimental her near-perfect alignment with Biden had been to her campaign.

Reading the final chapters of the book feels like re-watching a movie with a disastrous ending and hoping that it will be different. Harris tells of her family’s cupcakes that prematurely declared her victory, the bubbling excitement among her supporters, and the full confidence she had that the majority of voters would want to retire the MAGA era of American politics.

Harris ends “107 Days” on a nihilistic note, expressing a lack of desire to work within the system to protect the American people, because the guardrails put in place to protect us are failing. She suggests that we may, in the near future, need to “re-create” the government in its entirety due to the grave harm of the far-right wing Project 2025 agenda plans, noting that many have already been implemented.

She quotes the French Resistance journalist Francoise Girou: “This is how fascism begins. It never says its name. It creeps, it floats. When it reaches the tips of people’s noses, they say: ‘Is this it? You think? Don’t exaggerate!’ And then one day it smacks them in the mouth, and it is too late to get rid of it.”

And indeed, this quote is resonating with more and more Americans as the days go by.