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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).
Of the Grafting 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)....