He chronicles Franklin's tumultuous relationship with his illegitimate son and grandson, his practical marriage, and his flirtations with the ladies of Paris. In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin's amazing life, from his days as a runaway printer to his triumphs as a statesman, scientist, and Founding Father. His guiding principle was a 'dislike of everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people.' Few of his fellow founders felt this comfort with democracy so fully, and none so intuitively.

In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity. America's first great publicist, he was consciously trying to create a new American archetype. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.In best selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.īased on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk-a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate-became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom, and the universe. How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. By the author of the acclaimed bestsellers Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs, this is the definitive biography of Albert Einstein.

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