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Joseph Ellis (yes, that Joseph Ellis) gives Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin a glowing review. Quotable:

Isaacson recognizes from the start that the character portrayed in the ''Autobiography'' is one of Franklin's most artful inventions. He argues persuasively that Franklin's sharpest critics, from Max Weber to D. H. Lawrence, have directed their fire more at his masks than at the man beneath them.

Isaacson's 4th of July TIME magazine piece on Franklin is worth reading. Franklin -- and Isaacson -- get at the core of American liberalism in a very few well chosen words:

At age 12, Franklin became an apprentice at the printshop of his older brother James, who tended to be quite tough as a master. "I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me," Franklin later speculated, had the effect of "impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life."

And this:

The literary character Franklin invented was a triumph of imagination. Silence Dogood was a slightly prudish widow from a rural area, created by a spunky unmarried Boston 16-year-old who had never spent a night outside of the city. He imbued Mrs. Dogood with that spirited aversion to tyranny that he would help to make part of the American character. "I am," she wrote, "a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly." It was as good a description of the real Benjamin Franklin�and, indeed, of a typical American�as is likely to be found anywhere.