This is a book about Ben Franklin. It’s a biography, but the writer focuses not just on what Franklin said and did in his life, but on what he thought about life, and how it should be lived, so it is philosophy as well. What makes it even better is that Eric Weiner doesn’t just write about Franklin, he engages with his ideas and tries to apply them to his own life.
He spends much of this book traveling to places that are connected to and significant in Ben Franklin’s life. He goes from Boston to Pennsylvania and on to London and Paris. He paints a refreshingly accessible portrait of a remarkable man.
Most of us think of Ben Franklin as a statesman and as one of the founders of the United States, which of course he was. But he was also a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, a publisher, a humourist, and a philosopher. I knew something of his experiments with electricity, but I had no idea that many of the terms we use today, words like battery, charge, conductor, positive and negative charge were coined by Ben Franklin.
He experimented with all sorts of things besides electricity which led to the invention of the lightning rod, bifocals, the catheter and the odometer among things.
One of his beliefs was that one must not refuse public office if it is offered, which is what led him to go to France when he was in his seventies, in order to secure French support in the American revolutionary war against the British. He charmed the French royal court and became, in effect, America’s first ambassador to France.
This book would’ve been interesting on the basis of its subject alone, but Weiner brings such immediacy to his narrative, he engages so wholly with Franklin’s words and ideas that the reader is totally drawn into the book. This is one of the most engaging biographies that I’ve read in a while.