He wrote this book apparently in his spare time, while running Time and CNN and now heading the Aspen Institute. It’s safe to say that Walter Isaacson (without involving him in a comparison in which he would inevitably suffer), whose Benjamin Franklin: An American Life is out this week, is the foremost multitasker in the media world. He was, by consensus, the best writer in eighteenth-century America, as well as the nation’s first media tycoon and its shrewdest diplomat. His reputation for technological wizardry was such that during the Revolution, rumors ran rampant that he’d developed a system of mirrors that could incinerate the British fleet from afar, a death ray of a kind Don Rumsfeld might envy.
He had a string of mistresslike friendships (alas for him unconsummated). He had Madonna’s talent for self-invention, with an arsenal of pseudonyms, and the famous fur hat he wore in Paris to reinforce his image as a provincial of uncommon ability. Cheering crowds would greet him when he returned to Philadelphia from trips abroad. It’s hard to imagine that homely old Ben Franklin, peering out from behind his bifocals with that eighteenth-century mullet (among the few things he didn’t invent was the comb-over), was perhaps the most glamorous person in the world. Electric Adventure: In a Franklin biography, the brilliant light is always on, but who's home?
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