Simon SchusterProduct DescriptionIn 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.
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklins 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 Americas 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 Richards Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence the new nations alliance with France the treaty that ended the Revolution and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.
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.Amazon.com ReviewBenjamin Franklin?? writes journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson?? was that rare Founding Father who would sooner wink at a passer-by than sit still " formal portrait. What's more?? Isaacson relates in this fluent and entertaining biography?? the revolutionary leader represents a political tradition that has been all but forgotten today?? one that prizes pragmatism over moralism?? religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity?? and social mobility over class privilege. That broadly democratic sensibility allowed Franklin his contradi