| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. By Walter Isaacson. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 590 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-684-80761-0.)
Walter Isaacson has given us a splendid account of Benjamin Franklin's life. Lively and full, this colorful "chronological narrative biography" (p. 510) of one of the nation's greatest popular heroes is one that Franklin himself would have enjoyed and chuckled over. He would have glowed at the admiration that Isaacson lavishes upon him as the cosmopolitan entrepreneur who built a network of printing partnerships in colonial America, which the former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine redefines in modern lingo as a "'successful, vertically integrated media conglomerate'" (p. 126).	1
Of the crafting of writings on Franklin there is no end, but Isaacson's stands up wonderfully to the measure against which all are judged—Carl Van Doren's classic Benjamin Franklin (1938). It meshes nicely with Edmund S. Morgan's appreciative and reflective Benjamin Franklin (2002). Blend Isaacson and Morgan, and you have the humor, irreverence, common sense, craftiness, and wisdom that together are Benjamin Franklin. Mix Isaacson and Franklin, and you catch a glimpse of a twenty-first-century American creating his own persona (and in a sense our national persona) by inventing and reinventing Franklin's.	. . .

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