Word: first
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Benjamin Franklin, printer, philosopher, scientist, author, patriot and first citizen of Philadelphia, is America's universal man. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of his greatness was that he managed to be a kind of human golden mean-wise, moral, prudent, without being dull. This first volume of his collected papers gives readers the happy chance to get reacquainted with Franklin's winy wit, sage maxims and arrow-swift mind...
...Franklin to the age of 28, but these were the spawning years of his genius. He served his apprenticeship as a printer, journeyed to England and back, published the New England Courant, married, formed the "Junto," an intellectual self-improvement club of like-minded Philadelphians, and brought out the first three of the famed Poor Richard's Almanacks. Franklin also set down his basic religious outlook, a kind of deism that made him a logical child of the rationalist Enlightenment. Instinctively a yea-sayer to life, Franklin came very close to believing that whatever is is good. In "Articles...
...Melons are hard to know," "There is no little enemy." Poor Richard, of course, is also chockablock with moralistic homilies. D. H. Lawrence once carped that Franklin "made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock." Lawrence was not the first or the last to be infuriated by Franklin's middle-class prudence; yet Franklin's maxims-many taken from even earlier sages-are no less true for having become truisms. Who can deny that "He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas"? Or that "Light purse...
...Days of McKinley, by Margaret Leech. A first-rate biography which, if it leaves Mark Hanna's picked President as colorless as ever, also leaves him better understood...
Goldilocks the Victim. But even the present volume has its moments. With great glee, Miller lampoons the shock of the American tourist upon first encountering a Paris pissoir, adding: "I do not find it so strange that America placed a urinal in the center of the Paris exhibit at Chicago. I think it belongs there, and I think it a tribute which the French should appreciate. True, there was no need to fly the Tricolor above it." Oddly enough, the best piece is Miller's account of how, a little squiffed from cognac, he told the story of Goldilocks...