‘To this day,’’ Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write, Mitt Romney remains “an enigmatic presence to people outside his closest circle, a puzzle whose pieces don’t neatly fit.’’
Kranish and Helman’s “The Real Romney,’’ a timely, balanced new biography of the founder of Bain Capital and former Massachusetts governor, arrives as its subject moves to the front of a shrinking pack of Republican president hopefuls.
The authors, both longtime political reporters at The Boston Globe, set as their task presenting “the first complete, independent biography of Mitt Romney, a man whose journey to national political fame is at once remarkable and throughly unsurprising.’’ Romney’s story, they write, is one of a man “guided by his faith and firmly grounded in family’’ who grew up out of step with many in his generation to become a successful businessman and politician balancing an “uneasy relationship between conviction and vaunting ambition.’’
