Philadelphia is one of two American cities that Ben Franklin called home (the other being Boston, where he lived until he came to Philadelphia in his late teens). I don't know whether or not Boston embraces their Franklin connection, but Philadelphia certainly does. Much of the tourism advertising coming out of Philly features ol' Ben, and in the Old City section, where Franklin lived and worked (and where I've worked the last eleven years), it's hard to avoid the Franklin legacy. It's not unusual to even run into the man himself.
Even with all this Franklin history nearby, I still wasn't familiar his story beyond the usual grade-school-textbook profile of him: printer, writer, postmaster, inventor, and sage to our founding fathers. That's why I was interested in reading Gordon S. Wood's book, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. It promised to add the details that are often dropped from Franklin's story.
And the book does just that. Things that I didn't know, like his loyalty to the King (almost right up to 1776), his never fully being accepted into the gentry class because of his working-class origins, and his success in getting the French to repeatedly increase their funding for our war against the British. The book spends a lot of time detailing Franklin's years living in France, and a love of the French that made him consider staying there - and made many American politicians openly question his loyalty. I liked having the details of Franklin's life filled in. I now see him as a much more complex figure than just the hard-working and deep-thinking Quaker.
Unfortunately, as interesting as these new (to me) facts were, I found the book very hard to get through. I don't read many history books, but I did enjoy reading Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers a couple years ago. I was expecting this book to hold my interest like Ellis' book did, but Wood's writing was so dry it took me forever to get through. I couldn't get myself to want to read it at lunch, in bed, or on the weekends (times when I normally do most of my reading) so all my reading was done during my fifteen-minute ride on the train to and from work. It's a shame, because the book covers interesting aspects of Franklin's life, but it really reads like a high school history book. I would recommend it only if you were really into Benjamin Franklin.
After finishing this book I went out looking for something a little lighter. I came up with about five novels that looked promising, but my branch of the Philadelphia library didn't have any of them. So I ended up with Carl Hiaasen's most recent novel, Skinny Dip. A few years back I was really into Hiaasen's books, but after four or five of them their plots all seemed to follow the same structure and, as funny as he is, I got tired of reading the same story over and over again. I figure now that enough time has passed to give him another shot. We'll see if I was right.
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