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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.4 | The History Cooperative
130.4  
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October, 2006
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Book Reviews

Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America. By Philip Dray (New York: Random House, 2005. xviii, 279p. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $25.95.)
      In this gracefully written study of Benjamin Franklin's life, Philip Dray argues that Franklin's most important contribution to the eighteenth century was the lightning rod. Dray builds his account of Franklin's scientific and political career around Jacques Turgot's declaration that Franklin the scientist/patriot had "snatched lightning from the sky and the sceptre from tyrants." In Stealing God's Thunder, Franklin's lightning rod is ranked with Newton's Principia and the U.S. Constitution of 1787 as one of the greatest triumphs of the Enlightenment. At the center of this achievement, Dray's Franklin is a homespun and eminently reasonable hero who tactfully wrests lightning bolts from the hands of an angry God. . . .
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