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Summary: Benjamin Franklin: An American Fraud
Review: What a Franklinfest this turned out to be. "Statesman, inventor, all-around-swell guy." Well, I guess that's one way to look at Ben. But another way is to focus on his elitist attitude and absolute lack of respect for people of color in his manic push to establish this country. He was swell alright, if you were a white, British aristocrat, but a nightmare to everyone else. Arrogant, egotistical. He was never shy to tell others how to live their lives. As mentioned in this book, he even had the audacity to rewrite parts of the Constitution that Jefferson had painstakingly labored over. What a jerk.I loved the mention of the kite-flying incident, however.
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Summary: The inventor who continued to re-invent himself
Review: For those who enjoy history, particularly the American Revolutionary period, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, is an enjoyable and spirited review of a truly remarkable man. You learn about Franklin in American History class, but Isaacson picks out the actions that truly define Franklin's character and the times in a great story of one of the world's greatest inventors. The most telling, from my point of view, was how Franklin, as told by Isaacson, continually re-invented and refined his role in society. Isaacson's helps us understand Franklin's early decisions that later define him as true leader of the American revolution. Franklin's self-taught and can do attitude come alive as Isaacson describes Franklin's career as a printer. Even in Franklin's early career, Isaacson shows the reader how versitile Franklin is in not only his capacity to understand business, but his understanding of human nature and the politics of the time. These skills, elucidated in Franklin's later role as part of the American team sent to France, come alive again as Franklin works with a somewhat gruff partner in John Adams to bring along French support of the American war effort against England. Isaacson tells these historical events as if he was standing unnoticed behind our two French ministers of the American revolution. These thoughts about the book only begin to describe the story of Franklin by Isaacson. If you enjoy history, the American Revolution, science or just Ben Franklin, you will love this book.
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Summary: Discover Franklin and Discover America!
Review: Ben Franklin An American Life by Walter Isaacson is a book that should be required reading for all American high school students. I wish I had read this book thirty years ago for this book has transformed my cartoonish, single-dimensioned view of Benjamin Franklin into the multi-dimensional, sometimes controversial, and at all times entertaining historical figure he actually was. And while we view Mr. Franklin through the eyes of Author Walter Isaacson, his opinions are mostly invisible throughout almost 600 pages of text, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions. We know Ben Franklin today mostly as one of the founding fathers. But his presence in our lives comes mostly to us through companies that either bear his name or use his likeness in advertising. Generally we think of Franklin as a wise man whose Poor Richards Almanack and thirteen virtues remind us to work hard to improve ourselves. His character is affiliated with savings, with insurance, with investments and a whole host of products, which we buy because we should. Because it would be the right thing to do, if not the most desired thing to do. After reading Isaacson's book, I believe Franklin would get a chuckle out of what we have turned him into. I don't mean that Isaacson portrays Franklin as a fool. He certainly was not that. Isaacson allows us to see Franklin as so much more than his own Autobiography would have us know of him. Mr. Franklin was a great man, great in science, printing, writing, diplomacy, and democracy. Indeed he was the first great promoter of the middle class in America. He believed in the ability of man to make himself better. Certainly he was a self-made man. But he was also great in the way he lived his life. He loved to travel. As postmaster, he saw more of America probably than any American of his era. His wanderlust did not stop on this side of the Atlantic. He also visited most of Europe. For that matter he lived most of the second half of his life in Europe. Perhaps what I enjoyed so much about Isaacson's book was learning what Franklin was not. For example, he was not American, as we think of him, until very close to the actual Revolution. For most of his life, Franklin saw himself as a loyal citizen of the throne of England and worked mightily to avoid the very Independence Day in which Americans remember him so highly. He viewed the problems with England as a problem first with the Proprietors, then with the Legislature, and only finally with the king himself. If it had been possible to maintain America as an expanded part of England, with equal rights and responsibilities, Franklin would have happily supported such a plan. Also while Franklin was great in many endeavors, he was not a particularly good family man. He married his wife more out of expedience and necessity than out of romantic inclination. He needed a mother for his newborn son, William, and Deborah (not William's mother) was a willing candidate. Franklin lived fifteen of the final 18 years away from Deborah: he lived in Europe and she lived in Philadelphia. While he was always fond of Deborah, he was also fond of other women as well. Isaacson does not paint Franklin so much as an adulterer, though he may have been, but rather as more of a flirt. Franklin did not have many close relationships either. He was estranged from his son, when William remained loyal to the crown. The fact that William remained loyal was not such a shock when one considers that he was raised in England by Franklin when Franklin considered himself first and foremost a British citizen. While Franklin knew more great men of his generation than anyone, he was not particularly close to any of them. He was closer to the women in his life. This closeness was more of companionship and conversation than anything more lurid. My intention here is to write a book review, not another biography. But I have to admit that one of the great things that has happened in my life as a result of Isaacson's biography of Franklin's life is that I am more keenly desirous of knowing about the minds and the lives of the founding fathers of our great country. Benjamin Franklin An American Life helps me to understand who we are as Americans, as well as who we aren't. Understanding more of what happened 250 years ago helps me to understand more about today. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Isaacson's biography of Franklin. It is a long read. But near the end I was saddened to have to finally finish it. When I read the chapter of Franklin's death I was saddened as if I had lost someone close to me. I was pleased to turn the page and discovered that Isaacson wrote another entire chapter about Franklin after his death. Many writers and thinkers have commented on Franklin's life throughout American history. Franklin has gone through many recreations throughout the past two centuries and reading what has been written at various times also tells us something of those times and the changes in our country. I give Benjamin Franklin An American Life by Walter Isaacson my highest recommendation of five stars out of five stars. Read it. Enjoy it. Benefit from it. This book of Franklin's yesterdays can change your tomorrows.
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Summary: Isaacson's Portrait more detailed than any painting
Review: Walter Isaacson has done remarkable things with his book "Benjamin Franklin"
He has:
1) added a valuable and important work to the immense canon available on Benjamin Franklin.
2) written with subtlety, grace, and realism about world changing events and an enigmatic subject that are often mythesized beyond common empathy.
3) kept the book and the subject approachable and human.
4) made a long and complex life engaging, well explained, and fun.
I recommend this book without reservation. Well done, Sir.
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Summary: Accessible and interesting
Review: This book will not shake the world of Franklin scholarship, list the minutiae of his life, or advance any new or controversial theses about this giant among our Founding Fathers. What it does, and does quite well, is provide an interesting, accessible account of Franklin's life that is at the same time quite readable. For example, I hadn't realized just how much of his life he spent in England and how many Enlightenment figures he knew personally, nor had I realized the extent to which he had advanced the experimental sciences, particularly the study of electricity. This biography may not satisfy professional historians, but for the rest of us, this is a good choice.
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Summary: Ben is human
Review: More than anything, Isaacson presents Franklin as human. There were faults with Franklin and there were virtues. For instance, how good was this Founding Father at being a real father, or husband, or friend?
Without making judgements, Isaacson does a decent job at giving us this "Franklin was human" perspective that all icons deserve.
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Summary: Ben Franklin "Lite"
Review: Having first read H. W. Brand's "The First American: The Life and Time of Benjamin Franklin", I was extremely disappointed in Isaacson's effort. Quite frankly, it reads much like one would expect to find not in a good biography, but in the pages of Time magazine - simple, uncomplicated, and very light on the facts (though Isaacson freely offers his and other historians opinions throughout the book). If you want a thorough and well written biography of Franklin, you'll much prefer Brand's book to this one.
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Summary: Start your Franklin readings here
Review: I found this book to read very smoothly,...chapter integration was seemless. Packed with information, as a book on Franklin should be, yet not overly done. An excellent starting point for those who wish to know Franklin better.
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Summary: An American's Tale
Review: The biographical account of Benjamin Franklin's life by Walter Isaacson provides insight into who the real Benjamin Franklin was. Prior to reading this book I was familiar with Franklin and many of his inventions but I didn't have a clear understanding of who he really was, what he valued, and all the value he added to the life of Americans. This biography delved into the man as an entrepreneur, an inventor, a satirist, a statesman, and even as a lecherous old man. Walter Isaacson leads the reader on a journey through Franklin's life that puts him under the microscope and provides the reader with intimate information about how Franklin lived during is life, the philosophies and principles that guided him, and his innate curiosity that drove him to experimentation. While he was always looking for a useful purpose for his discoveries he recognized he might not be the one to realize all the possibilities his research might one day prove. This was the case with his research of the Gulf Stream, which he conducted on his many trips overseas. Many of his graphs and charts are similar to those used today.
Isaacson's book shows a great deal of history including the American education movement and the part Benjamin Franklin played in bringing education to the forefront during this era when, in general, basic survival was a major undertaking in life. Not only did Benjamin Franklin lay the framework for the first university in Philadelphia, which later became the University of Pennsylvania (Isaacson p. 438). Franklin was forward thinking in his belief of education and attempted to provide his grandchildren with as much formal education and life-experience as he possibly could. Shortly after the Constitutional Convention he stepped outside the box and rallied on the side of freeing slaves and further vocalized his ideas of providing the black people with education as well. Franklin worked to establish libraries both for his private groups and later for the public. He also left a provision in his will for funds in Philadelphia and Boston which were to be utilized over a 200 year period for making loans to budding entrepreneurs; one of the earliest examples of small business loans. The history also shows the part that Franklin played in developing satire as a way of influencing public opinion and his part in establishing printing wars. All of which led to the education of the public on matters of public concern.
This work creates a warm feeling for Benjamin Franklin and the contributions he made. It expounds on his many successes and virtues and also shows with brutal honesty his shortcomings and pitfalls. In general, Benjamin Franklin was well loved not only by Americans but also by nearly everyone who met him. He was so well liked that Americans named a state after him. The State of Franklin was later changed to Tennessee. At his funeral there were nearly 20,000 mourners and clergymen from every faith marched in the front of the procession (Isaacson p. 470).
Franklin's work as a diplomat was vividly shown during his final speech at the Constitutional Convention. Historian, Clinton Rossiter said of the speech, "the most remarkable performance of a remarkable life" (Isaacson p. 459). Clearly he was a remarkable man in so many ways. His life's work benefits us still today in ways we often fail to realize.
I would recommend anyone read this book that is interested in learning more about Benjamin Franklin as a man, the American Revolution and the men who played key roles in establishing our government and bringing about peace. I was truly amazed as I read this book by all the maxims and ideas that we still use today that came from Benjamin Franklin or, at the very least, were popularized by him over 200 years ago. Perhaps one of the most unique and memorable things that can be attributed to Franklin is the nation's great seal, suggested by Franklin in 1776, E Pluribus Unum, out of many one (Isaacson p. 457). Isaacson, W. (2003). Benjamin Franklin An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
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Summary: Transcendent life lessons of lasting resonance
Review: To many, Benjamin Franklin represents to them a man who is venerable, yet aloof; hearty, yet frugal; inventive, yet practical; compromising, yet rigid; bourgeois, yet elitist; industrious, yet leisurely; moralistic, yet far from Puritan; & affectionate, yet inscrutably emotionally detached from his own family. And to many more, he simply is the prosaic caricature of an unassuming old man in round spectacles flying a kite in the rain and magically summoning lightning from the sky. While the persona of Benjamin Franklin has been made to be many things by many people in the many years since his death in 1790 at the age of 84, it is neither, however, fair, nor accurate, to pigeonhole him into any one confining mold or category. That would be committing a most grievous affront to Franklin, as well as to the annals of history. Moreover, it would make you out to be an inanely foolish knave. What Walter Isaacson has accomplished is no small minor miracle. He has written a biography that allows you, the mere reader, to not only understand, but to live, Franklin's life as it plays out in the text, interestingly whose type font itself was championed by Franklin and used for the first printing of The Declaration of Independence. Indubitably, Franklin's popularity has risen and waned just as the prevailing moods of divergent epochs have arbitrarily shifted. While haughty Romanticists such as D.H. Lawrence overtly deplored Franklin, the middle class of America has revered his example and looked to him for his timeless sage advice during times of duress and volatility, such as The Gilded Age and The Great Depression. Isaacson candidly reveals all aspects of Franklin's extraordinary life from his momentous swaying of the French to join the struggling colonies in The Revloutionary War to such seemingly mundane, yet stangely provocative occurrences such as him getting caught kissing the daughter of his English landlord, who just happened to be 33 years his junior. Franklin, as many historians contend, was truly the first ever self-made man of The New World. Franklin created, and truly came to symbolize, the first ever group of "middling" class that would lay the foundation of our great country, a country that Franklin vowed to give everyone an opportunity, irrespective of heritage and birth, as well as explicitly devoid of elitist pretensions. This fledgling group of "leather-aprons" should adhere, said Franklin, to such virtues as religious tolerance, humility, respect of others, faith in the virtues of hard work and frugality, benevolent belief in voluntary efforts to help others, & resentment to unnecessary luxury, hereditary privileges. Seeing as my meager review will hardly do this infinitely intriguing and masterfully written book justice, you absolutely must read this incredible journey through the prodigiously captivating life of the man who, given the incomprehensible breadth of his achievements, I consider to be the most underrated figure in American history. "Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices."
- Poor Richard(aka Benjamin Franklin)
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