107 Days

Kamala Harris’s 107 Days is not so much a memoir as a political autopsy — brisk, bruised, and brimming with the defensive energy of someone still trying to make sense of a collapse she didn’t see coming. The U.S. Vice President turned presidential hopeful recounts the chaotic stretch that followed Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race: the “hundred and seven days” in which she became the presumed Democratic nominee, the target of relentless scrutiny, and ultimately, a symbol of how swiftly American politics can devour its own.

What distinguishes 107 Days from the average post-campaign confessional is its immediacy. Harris writes in present-tense bursts — fragments of exhaustion, anger, and disbelief that give the book a propulsive, sometimes breathless quality. She recalls phone calls with advisers, terse exchanges with party insiders, and the surreal reality of governing while campaigning under siege. The tone is half memoir, half crisis diary.

At its best, the book crackles with tension. Harris offers glimpses of internal fractures within the Democratic Party — territorial aides, second-guessing governors, and the ever-present spectre of misogyny and racial bias. She’s most compelling when she drops the political varnish and admits to fear or self-doubt: “I could feel the walls closing in, and still, I smiled,” she writes in one of the few passages that feels unfiltered. In those moments, the reader senses the woman behind the podium, struggling to remain composed while the machinery of politics grinds forward without mercy.

But 107 Days also succumbs to the pitfalls of its genre. Harris can be evasive where candour would serve her best, and quick to assign blame when reflection is called for. Rivals are sketched as antagonists; journalists, as vultures. She gestures at systemic problems — the party’s messaging vacuum, its digital disarray — without fully interrogating her own role in them. The result is a book that feels simultaneously raw and restrained, as if written in a rush to reclaim the narrative before anyone else could.

Stylistically, the prose toggles between sharp political reportage and campaign boilerplate. There are flashes of elegance — particularly when she describes the solitude of hotel rooms, the ritual of morning briefings, the physical toll of performance — but these moments are often drowned out by repetition and rhetoric. Readers seeking literary grace will find only brief reprieves amid the talking points.

Still, 107 Days succeeds as a document of disillusionment. Harris captures the impossible bind of modern politics: perform empathy, project confidence, and survive long enough to be misunderstood. Her frustration is palpable, and in that honesty — however filtered — lies the book’s most human note. She may not offer closure or contrition, but she gives us a front-row seat to the unraveling of an American political experiment that was always teetering on the edge.

107 Days is a flawed, fascinating, and faintly tragic account — less a memoir of triumph than a dispatch from a woman caught in the storm of her own making.