Unlike Washington's cherry tree, Franklin's kite was real. His experiments with electricity made him one of the great scientists of his day. He was a middleclass businessman whose success as a printer and a journalist allowed him to retire at 42—and he devoted the rest of his life to his country. He was diplomat who persuaded the French to back the American Revolution and the author of the first great American autobiography. He was an excellent swimmer. There was almost nothing he couldn't do well, except write poetry. But what truly distinguished Franklin was his talent of being great and human at the same time. He owned slaves as a younger man, but in his last years became an abolitionist(废奴主义者).When he fathered an illegitimate(私生的) son, he acknowledged his fatherhood and took the responsibility of raising the boy.
He seems strange today in the joy he took in compiling and creating all
those self- improvement maxims he published in Poor Richard's Almanac(年鉴) — “early to bed, early to rise” and so on. Generations of lazy boys could have been happier without that. But he was no hypocrite(伪君子). Isaacson tells us Franklin practiced what he preached, and often laughed at himself while he did so.
By a happy accident, this is the second excellent biography of Franklin to appear in two years, after Edmund S.Morgan's inspiring “Benjamin Franklin.”
6.
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