Word: ben
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always...
Virtue & Fate. Ben Franklin was not as smug as he sometimes sounds. He was endlessly bent on civic and personal improvement, whether it was founding a library or starting a fire department. The doctrine of human perfectibility to which he subscribed was not yet the easy evolutionary faith of the 19th century but an everlasting challenge to be met with hard work, sound reason and unswerving virtue. In the end, he accepted fate with the engaging humility of his self-written epitaph...
...Ben-Hur. Despite shortcomings, including a hero who is pretty much an overgrown boy scout, Director William Wyler's $15 million film version of Major General Lew Wallace's Biblical bestseller (1880) is the most expensive and the best screen spectacle ever produced...
...Ruth Brine, who spent a total of 30 hours with their subject. Dick Seamon, a newsman who can write equally well about Willie Mays, Shirley MacLaine or Anne Bancroft, epitomizes TIME'S regard for versatility and breadth, is a modern, journalistic example of the sort of writer Ben Jonson admired some 350 years ago. Wrote Jonson: "And though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise...
...Ben-Hur. The best (and most expensive) screen spectacle ever produced...