It seems Morgan likes to play my game too. As he tells it in the preface, "[Franklin] has made it possible for us to know the man behind that presence better than most of those who enjoyed it could have. Franklin can reach us in writing that speaks with a clarity given to few in any language at any time, and writing was his favored mode of communication. We can read his mail. And we can read an astonishing amount of everything else he wrote. . . . For the past fifty years scholars have been collecting every surviving scrap of it from all over the world, and it will eventually fill forty-six or more printed volumes of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Meanwhile, it is available on one small disk, a product of those inconceivable discoveries he dreamt of. This book exists because of that disk, which enabled me to write it-- no, compelled me to."

This endeavor is rare for two reasons. First, it is uncommon these days for an historian to write a preface without using the words "interrogate," "problematize" or "framework." Second, it is rare that a vanity project of this sort is actually worth reading. On the first count, Morgan has always been relatively immune to theoretical fads, and on the second, he rises far, far above type.

Since Morgan relied entirely on the papers of Benjamin Franklin to write the book, many important episodes in Franklin's life are elided or left out entirely. Morgan treats Franklin's childhood in Boston very briefly, as well as his arrival in Philadelphia (so memorably recounted in Franklin's own Autobiography). Relations between Franklin and his wives are somewhat sketchy, and we do not get very much sense of the good or ill Franklin left in his wake. The trouble is, Franklin is already heavily biographied-- two major contributions to the field have come out in the past two years, by H.W. Brands and Walter Isaacson-- and the difficulty comes in trying not to simply rehash familiar material. So what is to recommend a work which by its own lights is a narrowly-sourced love letter?

The answer is this: Morgan does not pretend to undertake a thorough examination of the life, times, and legacy of Benjamin Franklin (as if you could do that in 300 pages!), but rather only "say[s] enough about the man to show that he is worth the trouble. It is... pretty one-sided, a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing, worth spending time with." On that count, Morgan succeeds totally. We come to know Franklin as a man very much of the world, successful and happy, and unafraid to use his reputation, power, and connections to do what he thinks is right.