Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin By Jill Lepore
Book of Ages epub reader
And I do not expect to start What made me purchase this book was an interview with Jill Lepore on NPR She spoke of Jane Franklin so eloquently and even tenderly that I felt curious and moved I have been exhausted by a string of high profile nonfiction books by people like Eric Larsen and his Look at me brand of constructing historical narrative that I honestly was not sure what it would be like if a non fiction author so loved her character that she was willing to stay out of the way Now I know Jill Lepore constructs a complex and detailed narrative with admiration and sincerity She examines a life few others have thought to I read ever word.
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I won this book from Goodreads giveaway program and was very excited I m so sad to write a review that is anything but flattering but this is my honest opinion Considering the title of the book The Book of Ages The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin I naively thought that the book would actually focus on Ms Franklin But because there was so little known about Jane the majority of the book discussed Benjamin Franklin and the general time in which this brother and sister lived I ve read Benjamin Franklin s autobiography which was so much interesting than the descriptions of him contained in this book The author also included small stories about a host of people who had no relevance at all to Jane s life for the sole purpose of providing a context for the minimal details concerning Jane Of the book approximately 10 15% of it actually discussed Jane and most of that only recounted the children she had The writing was so dry that reading this was not enjoyable The biggest disappointment for me was that Jane s personality barely emerged Not only did she not do anything particularly meaningful in her own life but she was not influential in the success of anyone else s life either at least not in the 100 or so pages of the book I read Honestly I just can t figure out why this book was written and was furious that the book claimed to be something it was not The only thing that did interest me was the history of the book s title and the connection to Jane The actual scrawl of the words Book of Ages on the cover is a replica of Jane s own hand and title of a small book of papers she bound together which I thought was neat I m searching my brain to think of someone who would enjoy this book and I can only imagine it would be the small group of people who need to know absolutely everything about Benjamin Franklin and the time in which he lived. Book of the ages Read of my reviews on my blog 9780307958341 This is an interesting biography of Jane Franklin Mecom who was Benjamin Franklin s sister Everyone knows Mr Benjamin as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States but his sister Jane was almost lost to history Benny and Jenny as they were nicknamed as children were kindred spirits and exchanged many frank and personal letters during their lifetime The two eyes of man do not resemble nor are capable of being upon better terms with each other than my sister and myself Benjamin once wrote. Book of Ages ebook3000 Jane was born in 1712 when Benjamin was 6 years old It was Benjamin who taught Jane how to write which was a rare skill for women From the viewpoint of the 21st century it is still disturbing to learn how little of an education girls were given back then No public school in Boston enrolled girls Everyone needed to learn to read but there was no need for a girl to learn to write At home and at school when boys were taught to write girls learned to stitch Boys held quills girls held needles. Book of ages 30 In addition to writing Benjamin also urged his sister to read and often sent her books from his travels She had little free time while doing chores and raising her children but she was eager to read whenever she could She confided to her brother I read as much as I dare. The secret of all ages book pdf Sadly most of Jane s letters appear to have been lost to time We know they existed because Benjamin references them in his own letters of which have survived Lepore pieces together Jane Franklin s life from other documents including newspapers Benjamin s letters and also a small book that Jane herself wrote which she titled Book of Ages It was a chronicle of births and deaths in her family including her 12 children Lepore quietly and repeatedly points out that Jane was smart and shrewd and perhaps if she had been given of an education or if women s roles weren t so restricted she might have played an important role in society and politics similar to her brother It s always fun to play the What If game with history and in this case I think it might be true In the Appendix about her research methods Lepore admits how frustrating it was to try to learn about Jane when so little of her writing has survived For a long time I was so discouraged that I abandoned the project altogether I thought about writing a novel instead But I decided in the end to write a biography a book meant not only as a life of Jane Franklin Mecom but as a meditation on silence in the archives I wanted to write a history from the Reformation through the American Revolution by telling the story of a single life using this most ordinary of lives to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written from what remains of the lives of the great the bad and not as often the good. Book of Ages ebooks online The book is a bit slow at the beginning but I did enjoy reading about life in colonial America and the challenges Jane faced especially during the War of Independence Jane and her family fled for their lives on several occasions which made it even difficult to track down relatives later It was also fun to see the different spellings of early English Lepore noted that the idea of correct spelling didn t come until there were rules for printers People used to spell however they pleased even spelling their own names differently from one day to the next But only the learned only the lettered knew how to spell. EBook Book of agest The book also has good details about Ben Franklin s career but not so much that it overwhelms the narrative about Jane I would recommend it to fans of history especially to those who want to know about the lives of women in early America As Ben Franklin once wrote in Poor Richard s Almanack One half of the world does not know how the other half lives 9780307958341 It is difficult to convey the pleasure and excitement with which I read this history of Jane Franklin Mecom Lepore carefully reconstructs the period in which the Franklins lived and pieces together the life of Franklin s sister from fragments using a few of the many letters she wrote to her famous brother Benjamin Franklin She forces one realize again what historical research requires and how much we miss But one comes away from Jane s Book of Ages with wonder and awe at how much Lepore was able to capture through her assiduous researches. Book of ages story of your life Jane was the youngest of eight living children of Abiah and Josiah Franklin six years younger than the youngest son her famous and favorite brother Benjamin Franklin s was a family of tradesmen soapmakers saddlemakers candlemakers and printers Jane was born in late March 1712 married at fifteen and lived until early May 1794 She was eighty three. Sages of the ages book pdf Jane Mecom n e Franklin birthed some thirteen or fourteen children most of whom preceded her in death It is now thought that the family may have been tubercular for they did not thrive were languishing in health layabout in deed and several went mad if they survived beyond their twenties Very few we know is Able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding Providence So few are able to overcome the meanness of their birth and life to achieve something meaningful Her brother did In a different world the battles at Lexington and Bunker Hill and the longer war for independence that became the birth of the nation She was a intimate correspondent with one of the most famous designers of the Constitution and loved and was beloved of him all her life Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this history is the fact that Lepore was able to construct it at all given that so little remained of the woman and her chattel Lepore has labored mightily to reconstruct this intimate portrait of a woman her life and locale And this history does what all great histories do they make us yearn to read discover learn all we can 9780307958341 In a way I received than I wanted from this book and less than I expected So little is known about Ben Franklin s sister that the author had to use quite a bit of filler and off topic information The whole history in England of the beginnings of the family and pf course how the family spread how Franklin made so much of his self coming from so little Much of this information was fascinating but at the same time not what I expected from this book Did expect information on Jane and really enjoyed the parts of this book that were about her So sad that she never had her own room until she was in her sixties she didnt complain about that fact but did relish her own space when she was finally able to attain it Ben Franklin is one person in history I would have liked to have met He was a singular and capable individual than capable and left his imprint in history Nothing I read of this man could be considered a waste of time but the book could have been shorter considering so little of his sister is actually known 9780307958341 Looking beyond great men and big events makes history leap to life the captivating story of Ben Franklin s sister JaneI first learned about Jane Jenny Franklin in an earlier book by Jill Lepore The Whites of Their Eyes and though there isn t than a few pages on her I was so moved and taken by her story that it s my strongest memory of that book and I was left wanting to know Jill Lepore s mother must have felt the same way because as I read in Lepore s recent New Yorker article she kept urging Lepore to write Jane Franklin s biography But there was a problem Jane was not famous like her brother Ben so information about her though tantalizing is not abundant I m very glad Lepore persevered anyway because it s Jane s everywoman commonness that makes her story so fascinating She was her brother s equal smart inquisitive innovative and hardworking but being female she wasn t educated she married young to a ne er do well husband and she had a dozen children most of whom she outlived so her life was very different from Ben s In spite of their disparate circumstances Benny and Jenny were close all of their lives and she was as caught up in the struggles for independence as he was Lepore has managed to weave together a haunting intriguing sometimes exciting biography by digging into many sources and learning about Jane s life made the history of her time vivid for me in ways that the lives of great men never have I was on the edge of my seat reading about the events leading up to the American Revolution through her eyes Along with thousands of others Jane had to flee her home in Boston when the British occupied the city She was 63 years old and the roads were jammed with people many of whom were not sure exactly where they were going to go She locked her house before she left but knew the soldiers would break in take what they wanted and destroy the rest she was right Using the cunning she shared with her brother she did manage to smuggle out some of her possessions right under the noses of officials who were meant to stop such activity Lepore s writings always dig deep making you think and engaging your emotions She has a way with words so reading her is a pleasure In Book of Ages she s rescued a worthy woman from obscurity I couldn t put this book down 9780307958341
| Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin By Jill Lepore |
| 0307958345 |
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| 464 |
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Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper 41 Professor of American History Harvard College Professor and chair of Harvards History and Literature Program She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker Winner of the Anisfield Wolf Award for the best non fiction book on race and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize The Name of War Knopf 1998 winner of the Bancroft Prize the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J Anthony Lukas Award A co founder of the magazine Common place Lepore s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times the Times Literary Supplement American Scholar the Los Angeles Times the Washington Post The Daily Beast the Journal of American History and American Quart Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper 41 Professor of American History Harvard College Professor and chair of Harvard s History and Literature Program She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker Winner of the Anisfield Wolf Award for the best non fiction book on race and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize The Name of War Knopf 1998 winner of the Bancroft Prize the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J Anthony Lukas Award A co founder of the magazine Common place Lepore s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times the Times Literary Supplement American Scholar the Los Angeles Times the Washington Post The Daily Beast the Journal of American History and American Quarterly Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities the Pew Foundation the Gilder Lehrman Institute the Charles Warren Center and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians. Book of ages summary Jill lives in CambridgeMassachusetts site_link Because of books like this I wish that goodreads offered rating options in addition to stars Gleaning as much information as she did from the limited information available about Jane Franklin really was an astonishing feat I would like to give Jill Lepore 5 stars for research and insight I gave it three stars overall because it is tedious to read and the emphasis on the life of Jane s brother Ben Franklin not surprisingly is overly emphasized Honestly I would have preferred commentary about the lives of women in colonial times This is an important book and an excellent springboard for discussion about gender roles throughout US history 9780307958341 She was born in 1712 but none of her letters before 1758 survived She learned to write during a time when three in five women in New England could not sign their names She never sat for a portrait She collected a library of everything her brother Ben Franklin wrote Her brother taught himself to write by reading and he taught her through letter writing They wrote to each other often and at a later stage in life they seemed to be best friends Yet he never mentioned her in his memoir though given what I know now one can only wonder if she was edited out of his memoir What did remain of Jane Franklin did so because she was Benjamin Franklin s sister These are the remains that her biographer Lepore pieced together so eloquently to tell this story Biography and history fascinates me Yet there is something even appealing about the lives of the obscure the idea that ordinary lives speak in extraordinary volume In this historical juxtaposition of the scholarly brother and homemaker sister there are some really great snippets of American history America s break from Great Britain and the rise of the book printing and literary worlds At only 267 pages the rest of the book consists of notes and appendices this was an informational read I might say about it later if I get a moment to switch from the touch screen to a laptop and actually organize my thoughts 9780307958341 I will be the first to admit that I doubt my own rating I do not usually read historical non fiction some of them twice Sometimes I got a little bored But I loved this story so much that I did not care 9780307958341 Everywoman s HistoryBook of Ages is history at its most enjoyable Though the book purports to be mostly about Jane Franklin Mecom it s about her brother Benjamin and the history of the time they lived in This is not a negative and it is not because of a lack of research effort on author Jill Lepore s part Jane was a nobody This resulted in most of the letters she wrote to her beloved brother being lost They were destroyed due because they were not considered valuable On the other hand even in his own time Franklin s letters were not only valued but often shared and savored and discussed by the recipient and their friends and acquaintances Jane was largely unschooled as was true for most women and no doubt many men of the time Her spelling is instinctual Her ideas however are humorous and insightful She was well read by any standards She also had a ne er do well husband and many children and then grandchildren and great grand children to care for and she lived far longer than most people of the time She was an uncommonly educated and thoughtful woman an odd combination of being extraordinary and yet an everywoman. Book book asti Lepore s book says as much about how history is passed down as it does about Jane and Ben and their loving relationship She talks about writing and the evolution of literature in general she touches on key points in our nation s beginning most affectingly she talks about people and their relationships with one another She brings daily life in the mid to late 1700 s alive with many details Constant tending to children soap making the contemporary apprenticeship system endless struggle to stay alive during the Revolutionary War years and its preamble and the years that followed etc This is history told on a human level This review is based on an advance reader s copy provided by the publisher Disclaimer given as required by the FTC 9780307958341 I m supposed to be finished with all things Franklin and working on the next book but I couldn t resist When people used to ask me what kind of historical fiction I wrote I d say small stories about big ideas Benjamin Franklin s Bastard was first that could be called a big story but I found myself once again focusing on the women involved in that story who had fallen into the historical cracks I so loved to sink my teeth into Jill Lepore s book about what might appear to be another small piece of that story and find it stood so wondrously tall that Benjamin Franklin s sister was at last given back her life along with its significance 9780307958341.[1]She might have been his equal