Purchase
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE
By: Walter Isaacson
Biography of a popular founding father
Simon and Schuster
March 2004
608 pages
ISBN: 074325807X
Paperback
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Biography
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution. Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - December 7, 2013
CBS Sunday Morning - January 10, 2010
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - January 17, 2006
| 
© 2003-2026