Man, lately I’ve consistently been striking out on biographies about important people. I had some reasonable momentum going on this one about Franklin, but ran out of steam about halfway through and kept getting distracted whenever I sat down to read it. I blame Robert Caro for this. His four-volume series about Lyndon Johnson set a bar for readability that nothing else in this genre has been able to match. Isaacson seems really enamored with Franklin, which is a little distracting. The book does have lots of fun facts sprinkled throughout, though. For example; until lightning rods were widespread, apparently church steeples were constantly getting struck by lightning and burning cities to the ground.