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Title: Benjamin Franklin : An American Life by Walter Isaacson, Boyd Gaines ISBN: 0-7435-3365-8 Publisher: Simon & Schuster (Audio) Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.44 (72 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The First American Renaissance Man
Comment: Walter Isaacson's biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, recalls the genius, the drive and the wisdom that Benjamin Franklin brought to the birth of the United States.
Franklin developed his innate curiosity and empowered his always practical, often noble ambition by becoming a voracious reader and prolific writer in his early childhood. He learned to read from his father Josiah's bookshelf, choosing books like Plutarch's Lives and Cotton Mather's Bonifacius: Essays to do Good. He read essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in London's The Spectator, then recreated them in his own words. "I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious."
Instead of study at Harvard with many of his peers, Franklin acquired his advanced education as an adolescent printing apprentice to his older brother James at James' Boston weekly, the New England Courant from 1718 to 1723. While he was learning the printer's trade in the Courant pressroom, Franklin tapped his innovative imagination to create the pseudonymous penname, Mrs. Silence Dogood, under which he wrote 14 essays that he submitted for publication anonymously to his brother, thus concealing his writing talent from James' jealous insecurity. Franklin's female point-of-view from which he wrote often during his life cleverly analyzed topics like the conflict between church and state, relief for single women and the "proud, self-conceited great blockheads" graduating from Harvard at the time. Isaacson says Franklin's Mrs. Dogood became the most popular writer in colonial America.
In addition to printing and writing anonymously for the Courant, Benjamin even served as publisher of the paper for three issues when James ran afoul of the Massachusetts colony's General Court for publishing a religiously inflammatory piece. Thus it was that Franklin began his professional life in the late 18th century as a Boston newspaper printer, writer and publisher, all before the age of 18. He was later to operate a very successful printing business and publish his own paper in Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Gazette and entertain America annually for 25 years beginning in 1732 with Poor Richard's Almanac. It is little wonder many consider Benjamin Franklin the Father of American Journalism.
Even though it was his professional foundation and lifelong pursuit, journalism was far from Franklin's only career. He evolved into America's first Renaissance Man by re-inventing himself frequently throughout his life. Franklin was extraordinarily successful as inventor and scientist, as businessman, politician and diplomat, as educator, librarian and philosopher, as rebel, peacemaker and colleague of patriots, statesmen and tradesmen in America, England and France. Franklin creations that survive today include the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 when he was 27 and the first non-sectarian college in America that opened in 1751 and became known 40 years later as the University of Pennsylvania. It is this remarkable, life-long and usually successful personal re-invention that makes Franklin such a dominant character and inspirational role model in American history.
Franklin was 70 when he was selected a member of the Second Continental Congress that convened in 1775 in Philadelphia. He contributed substantively to the Congress, including a proposed set of Articles of Confederation for the new country. He also served as editor to Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Isaacson explains how Franklin can be said to hold another honorable seat in U.S. history, that of the father of the American Middle Class. Few of our country's founding fathers felt comfort with democracy as fully as did Franklin. As a result, America's down-to-earth shopkeepers, tradesmen and backwoodsmen revered him. His Autobiography was the one book Davy Crockett took with him to his death at the Alamo.
Although raised in the Puritan epicenter of Boston, Franklin was a freethinking moralist who practiced religious tolerance while pursuing lives in business, science and politics. Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold writes that Franklin's life shows, "what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving." Francis, Lord Jeffrey, a founder of the Edinburgh Review, was high in his praise of Franklin. "This self-taught American is the most rational, perhaps, of all philosophers," he said. "He never loses sight of common sense in any of his speculations."
Although not without his critics, Franklin drew high praise from several quarters. Herman Melville wrote, "Having carefully weighed the world, Franklin could act in any part of it." Emerson put Franklin in rarified company: "Franklin was one of the most sensible men that ever lived ... more useful, more moral and more pure" than Socrates.
Isaacson says Franklin was always open to different opinions, unwavering in his opposition to arbitrary authority. He believed strongly that rights and power were based not on the happenstance of heritage but on merit, virtue and hard work. He felt he could best serve God by serving his fellow man and made his choices accordingly. Above all, Isaacson says, Franklin was unwavering and at times heroic in his "faith in the wisdom of the common citizen that was manifest in an appreciation for democracy and an opposition to all forms of tyranny."
Benjamin Franklin is an American hero. Walter Isaacson's biography of Franklin is a fine piece of scholarship, especially worthy of study by all who aspire to lives in business, public service and yes, journalism.
Rating: 4
Summary: Almost a perfect biography
Comment: I found the book interesting, and thoroughly researched. But I had the recurring impression that I was either attending a university lecture or reading someone's doctoral dissertation. Most disconcerting was the occasional coy reference by the author to "remember that name, it comes up later."
Come, now: That does not belong in a serious work, and I was under the impression such was the author's aspiration.
For a perfect biography, read "John Adams" by David McCullough.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great inspirational read
Comment: Benjamin Franklin, was, middle class America. He believed that the middle class was the strength of our nation. He skillfully designed his life, to rise above the limitations of his own middle class upbringing and became the politically perceptinve public figure we know today.
In the same respect that Mr. Franklin designed his life, Mr. Isaacson has designed this biography. "Benjamin Franklin An American Life" is uniquely written, intriguing, and in depth. The author tenaciously delivers an extensively researched historical account of Benjamin Franklin and this nation. He smoothly transitions Mr. Franklin's life from an indentured youth apprenticing as a poet in his brother's print shop, writing under a woman's name when his brother would not let him write for the paper, joining the Masons to mingle with the elite, and finally bringing him into the respected founding father of this nation.
The author, Walter Isaacson has broken each chapter into segmnents of Mr. Franklin's life, referenced all things thouroughly, leaving no doubt of where his ideas came from. This book shows us, that like Mr. Franklin, there is the ability to rise above mediocrity. Mr. Isaacson's biography is a channel for that great wise man, Benjamin Franklin, to inspire us almost three hundred years later.
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