His homespun humor, his ingenuity, his sort of urban industriousness. But also, everything he did helped create what we are. WALTER ISAACSON: He is so quintessentially American. JUDY WOODRUFF: Walter Isaacson, it's Benjamin Franklin, and you put in the title, 'An American Life.' Why did you do that? The following is an edited transcript of the interview: I talked with Isaacson this week about the book and what Franklin might think of America today. The book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, takes an in-depth look at how the man considered one of the greatest and most accomplished of American founders helped define the kind of society America would become. His subject is the writer, philosopher and scientist Benjamin Franklin. The author is former TIME magazine and CNN executive Walter Isaacson. Agent, Amanda Urban.WASHINGTON (CNN) - A biography hitting the bookstores this week shines new light on one of the more famous and more misunderstood of America's Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, for all its length, it's a book of connected short segments without artful, easy transitions So whether this fresh and lively work will replace Carl Van Doren's beloved 1938 Benjamin Franklin Which seeks to restore Adams to public affection, this book has no overriding agenda except to present the story of Franklin's life. Unlike, say, David McCullough's John Adams, After examining the large body of existing Franklin scholarship as skillfully and critically as any scholar, Isaacson admits that his subject always 'winks at us' to keep us at bay-which of course is one reason why he's so fascinating. The oldest, most distinctive and multifaceted of the founders, Franklin remains as mysterious as Jefferson.

Isaacson (now president of the Aspen Institute, he is the former chairman of CNN and a Henry Kissinger biographer) has a keen eye for the genius of a man whose fingerprints lie everywhere in our history. How do the two books differ? Isaacson's is more detailed it lingers over such matters as the nature of Franklin's complex family circumstances and his relations with others, and it pays closer attention to each of his extraordinary achievements.

Isaacson's longer biography easily holds its own. Following closely on the heels of Edmund Morgan's justly acclaimed Benjamin Franklin,

Benjamin franklin book walter isaacson