The book I chose for my book review was A Mirror for Greatness: Six Great Americans by Bruce Bliven. He wrote this book in 1975 and the McGraw-Hill Book Company in New York published it. This book goes thought the live of six Americans: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. It shows their true character. .
Benjamin Franklin was a jack-of-all-trades and master of many. No other American, except possibly Thomas Jefferson, has done so many things so well. During his long and useful life, Franklin concerned himself with such different matters as statesmanship and soap making, book printing and cabbage growing, and the rise of tides and the fall of empires. He also invented an efficient heating stove and proved that lightning is electricity.
As a statesman, Franklin stood in the front rank of the people who built the United States. He was the only person who signed all four of these key documents in American history: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris making peace with Britain (now the United Kingdom), and the Constitution of the United States. Franklin's services as a diplomat in France helped greatly in winning the Revolutionary War. Many historians consider him the ablest and most successful diplomat that America has ever sent abroad.
Franklin was the leader of his day in the study of electricity. As an inventor, he was unequaled in the United States until the time of Thomas A. Edison. People still quote from Franklin's Sayings of Poor Richard and read his Autobiography. Franklin helped establish Pennsylvania's first university and America's first city hospital.
Franklin's fame extended to Europe as well as America. Thomas Jefferson hailed him as "the greatest man and ornament of the age and country in which he lived." A French statesman, Comte de Mira beau, referred to Franklin as "the sages whom two worlds claimed as their own.
