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. He suggests that Franklin turned the phrase to sell the peace.

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. Isaacson doesn’t know quite what to do with Franklin’s famous assertion that there never was a good war or a bad peace.

He recounts the little incidents that Franklin uses to illustrate maxims, but, just as Franklin does so well in his life story, Isaacson keeps the tale moving. “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. Isaacson is a good reader of the Autobiography.

The Christian Science Monitor review from July 2003 Franklin Isacson, Coefficient Capital LLC: Profile and Biography - Bloomberg Markets Bloomberg Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg.

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