Benjamin Franklin In London: The British Life Of America's Founding Father

James Srodes offers a review in the Washington Times of George Goodwin's Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father

Considering that the U.S. Library of Congress already houses more than 10,000 books, articles, doctoral dissertations and ephemera about Benjamin Franklin, one can wonder what new can be said about our most multilayered Founding personality.

Happily, the answer is, quite a bit. It is hard to believe, but of all our compelling American historical figures, a complete literary biography of Franklin’s life has never been written. The late Leo Lemay, a leading Franklin authority, managed only three volumes of his projected seven-volume complete Franklin biography before he died. Other attempts to capture this scientist, master of the printing press and news format, philosopher, politician, spy, bon vivant, inventor, and mentor of most of the other Founding Fathers, all have foundered under the complexity of capturing his multitasked and often contradictory life with any coherence. Franklin’s life, it seems, can only be approached in slices, hence the groaning shelves of Frankliniana in the Library of Congress.

This complexity has meant that whole parts of Franklin’s life often are glossed over by other biographers. The biggest gap in the Franklin story is the more than one-quarter of his 84-year life when he was absent from North America, most famously the decade spent in France, where he single-handedly dragged a reluctant French king into providing the money, guns and troops that tipped the balance in our Revolutionary War.

But a more important, largely scanted period is the roughly 18 years Franklin spent in London. That is when he underwent the painful, and fateful evolution from loyal English subject to that of fierce rebel, revolutionary and underground master of spycraft.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/9/book-review-benjamin-franklin-in-london-the-britis/ 

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War

James Srodes at the Washington Times offers a good review of Max Hastings' Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War.

If you are as alarmed as I am over how the world’s political leadership — especially our own — seems to be a parade of imbeciles, then invest $35 and read about how the world slid into a similar global catastrophe almost exactly 99 years ago. While history does not repeat itself exactly, this book shows how close it can come.

The British editor and war correspondent Max Hastings over the past two decades has become the contemporary premier historian of 20th-century war. Most of his more than two-dozen books, such as his 2011 masterpiece, “Armageddon,” focus on World War II. But in this large and lavishly illustrated book, he examines just the final six months of a single year when the world descended from an idyllic, albeit unstable, age into the chasm of carnage and upheaval that is known as World War I.

The real strength of this story is how Mr. Hastings portrays the principal characters, not as stereotyped tyrants, greedy empire builders or mindless militarists, but rather as very real human beings with as many flaws as virtues. Most of all, they were prisoners of the times in which they lived and had to make decisions. In other words, a lot like the current crowd.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/23/book-review-catastrophe-1914/