Word: franklin
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...youthful academic, offers a slightly different twist on the recent pack of Dead White Male biographies to hit the shelves. Brands hasn’t chosen a president, nor has he chosen a figure that has traditionally captivated the American imagination. In fact, the last major biography on Ben Franklin was written nearly six decades...
Instead, Brands has capitalized on his study of Ben Franklin, whose exploits are well beaten into the heads of most third graders. Franklin is an American cliché, the symbol of the self-made man with a broad array of talents: inventor (of the Franklin stove, bifocals), writer (of Poor Richard’s Almanac and editor of the Declaration of Independence), businessman (printer) and politician (beginning as colonial envoy to Britain followed by a lengthy stint as the elder member of the Constitutional Convention...
...easy task to make the author of the dictum, “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,” into someone Americans of all shapes and sizes would care to read about. But Brands felt he could remake Franklin into an icon, using the man’s life to tell the story of American identity...
...There’s something distinctly modern in the spirit of Ben Franklin,” Brands contends. “He was very much a self-interested, self-made man, who made decisions based on pragmatics...
While most American students are forced to suffer through the highly moralistic autobiography of a self-important Ben Franklin, a work which ends before the Revolutionary War even begins, Brands breathes new life into the familiar story of the so-called “first American.” His style is unconventional and, at times, audacious. He begins by placing the reader at a cockfight on royal grounds that Franklin attended just before answering for colonial misbehavior in front of the British Parliament...