Cotton Mather was the son of one great Puritan preacher, Increase Mather, and the grandson of two others, John Cotten and Richard Mather. This juvenile biography by Norman Jean Lutz for the Colonial Leaders series focuses on how Cotton Mather tried to live up to the responsibilities of his family heritage, graduating from Harvard at the age of 15. Although probably best known for being a clergyman, young readers will get a better sense of Cotton Mather as an author of more than 400 books ranging from sermons and poetry to books teaching about science. His two most famous and popular works were an 800-page volume "Magnalia Christi Americana" ("The Might Deeds of Christ in America"), which told the story of the first 80 years of the Puritans in New England, and "Bonifacius" ("Doer of Good," known popularly as "Essays to Do Good," which had a profoun impact on Benjamin Franklin. Lutz also covers Cotton Mather's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials, for which, she argues, he has been unjustly criticized, and the Great Awakening. Actually, there is relatively little about him as a Puritan or as a preacher and, ironically, more about him as a man of science, who supported the new idea of innoculating people against small pox. A lot of time is also devoted to his family and the tragic deaths of his first two wives and most of his young children. I suspect that in most contemporary American History textbooks Cotton Mather is probably mentioned only in passing, so young readers and teachers will certainly find much more about him here and get a sense for how he was something of a proto-revolutionary. Other books in the Colonial Leaders series look at Benjamin Banneker, Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and Peter Stuyvesant.