Genre: Historical Biography
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013
Pages: 464
Rating: Do Not Recommend
Synopsis: From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.
Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.
Review: I sort of expected this book to be the cure for insomnia, but decided to give it a chance anyway. I was excited when the first few chapters were really interesting. It was all downhill from there. There just wasn't enough depth, and I didn't come away with a real sense of who Jane Franklin really was.
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