![]() His ability to work with others and get the best out of them proved invaluable to not only the Declaration of Independence and the diplomatic missions it spawned, but the Constitution itself - calling it as near perfect as it could be.Isaacson presents his information in an ostensible chronological format, but often the facts he presents seem to be competing for attention. ![]() He was a master of diplomacy and compromise in the face of strong personalities with little patience for the process. This might not put him in the same league as theoretical or "pure" scientists, but it does make his contributions feel more lasting.I also have a better understanding of his attitude toward setting up an independent state and his role in doing so. Everything he did was motivated out of a desire for a practical benefit. I also had no idea of his origins, how he came to the Colonies or early civic activities and now I feel on better ground. I knew of his scientific and inventing contributions, but didn't know how early on he made some of his discoveries - the popular motif of Franklin as an old man with a kite is way off base. In broad strokes I knew how things would turn out that eventually we'd get France's reluctant backing in the separation from Britain, that we'd win the war and that Franklin's behind-the-scenes efforts to effect both outcomes were constant and often the only efforts.Franklin the man was a sketch for me though, even if I did somewhat know him through the long tunnel of history. I guess it was the known quantity aspect of the biography that made it slow going for me. After reading the exhaustive work on John Adams by David McCullough, I felt like I should read about Adams's contemporaries and when I noticed this book collecting dust at my mom's house, I took it home. Laziness on my part most likely rather than any fault of the author or his subject. I can't really tell you why this biography took me a year to finish. In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin’s amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century. 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. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin’s life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Walter Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the runaway apprentice who became, over the course of his eighty-four-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. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Einstein and Steve Jobs, shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.īenjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble.
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