H.W. Brands - The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
Here you can read online H.W. Brands - The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
- Author:
- Publisher:Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Genre:
- Year:2010
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
H.W. Brands: author's other books
Who wrote The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
The First American
A vivid portrait of the 18th-century milieu and of the 18th-century man. [Brands is] a master storyteller.
The Christian Science Monitor
A thorough biography of Benjamin Franklin, Americas first Renaissance man. In graceful, even witty prose Brands relates the entire, dense-packed life.
The Washington Post
A comprehensive, lively biography. The largest, most detailed Franklin biography in more than sixty years. [Brands] is a skilled narrator who believes in making good history accessible to the non-specializing book lover, and the general reader can read this book with sustained enjoyment.
The Boston Globe
Supremely readable. Deserves unstinting praise. A fine example of a particular type of historical writing, the presentation of history as narrative. Brands shows [Franklin] in lively detail at each stage of his life. An excellent history.
The London Free Press
A rousing, first-rate life of a Founding Father. Brands is the best sort of popularizer. [He] adds flesh to a hallowed ghost, and the result is that the reader admires Benjamin Franklin all the more. Superb.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Engaging. Brands is a skilled biographer. [He] deftly fills in the contours of Franklins extraordinary life.
The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
A fluid, clear, and nicely paced book. Enjoyable to read.
The Weekly Standard
Stunning. Brands, with admirable insight and arresting narrative, constructs a portrait of a complex and influential man in a highly charged world. [He] does an excellent job of capturing Franklins exuberant versatility as a writer who adopted countless personae that not only predestined his prominence as a man of letters but also as an agile man of politics.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Stirring and eloquent.
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
Worthwhile reading on an American worth remembering.
BookPage
A humanizing biography that enhances the founding fathers greatness.
Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale)
Eminently readable. [Brands] create[s] an absorbing portrait of the 18th-century world that was the backdropand the stagefor Americas multidimensional journalist, inventor, diplomat, propagandist, moralist, humorist, and revolutionary.
Library Journal (starred review)
A logical choice for anyone who wants to learn about Franklins life.
The Oregonian
Informative. Brands writes in a clear, lively, novelistic style and is especially good at revealing Franklin, the living, breathing, flawed human being.
Book
Highly praised. A frank account of the remarkable Renaissance man.
Gene Shalit, NBC Today
A delightful mosaic. Brands gives new life to the mythic hero we thought we already knew.
American History
The First American
H. W. Brands is Distinguished Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of many books, among them T.R.: The Last Romantic, the critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt; The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s; and The Strange Death of American Liberalism. He lives in Austin, Texas.
The Strange Death of American Liberalism
The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (editor)
Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History (editor, with Martin J. Medhurst)
The Use of Force after the Cold War (editor)
Beyond Vietnam: The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson (editor)
Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey
What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy
T.R.: The Last Romantic
Since Vietnam: The United States in World Affairs, 19731995
The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power
The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s
The United States in the World: A History of American Foreign Policy
Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East, 19451993
The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War
Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines
Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 19181961
India and the United States: The Cold Peace
The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 19471960
Cold Warriors: Eisenhowers Generation and American Foreign Policy
January 29, 1774
A lesser man would have been humiliated.
Humiliation was the purpose of the proceeding. It was the outcome eagerly anticipated by the lords of the Privy Council who constituted the official audience, by the members of the House of Commons and other fashionable Londoners who packed the room and hung on the rails of the balcony, by the London press that lived on scandal and milled outside to see how this scandal would unfold, by the throngs that bought the papers, savored the scandals, rioted in favor of their heroes and against their villains, and made politics in the British imperial capital often unpredictable, frequently disreputable, always entertaining. The proceeding today would probably be disreputable. It would certainly be entertaining.
The venue was fitting: the Cockpit. In the reign of Henry VIII, that most sporting of monarchs in a land that loved its bloody games, the building on this site had housed an actual cockpit, where Henry and his friends brought their prize birds and wagered which would tear the others to shreds. The present building had replaced the real cockpit, but this room retained the old name and atmosphere. The victim today was expected to depart with his reputation in tatters, his fortune possibly forfeit, his life conceivably at peril.
Nor was that the extent of the stakes. Two days earlier the December packet ship from Boston had arrived with an alarming report from the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. The governor described an organized assault on three British vessels carrying tea of the East India Company. The assailants, townsmen loosely disguised as Indians, had boarded the ships, hauled hundreds of tea casks to deck, smashed them open, and dumped their contents into the harborforty-five tons of tea, enough to litter the beaches for miles and depress the companys profits for years. This rampage was the latest in a series of violent outbursts against the authority of Crown and Parliament; the audience in the Cockpit, and in London beyond, demanded to know what Crown and Parliament intended to do about it.
Alexander Wedderburn was going to tell them. The solicitor general possessed great rhetorical gifts and greater ambition. The former had made him the most feared advocate in the realm; the latter lifted him to his present post when he abandoned his allies in the opposition and embraced the ministry of Lord North. Wedderburn was known to consider the Boston tea riot treason, and if the law courts upheld his interpretation, those behind the riot would be liable to the most severe sanctions, potentially including death. Wedderburn was expected to argue that the man in the Cockpit today was the prime mover behind the outburst in Boston. The crowd quivered with anticipation.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin»
Look at similar books to The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.