I am a 3. grade teacher and when I was reading this book to my class, they all were fascinated by it. Benjamin Franklin was no longer a "stranger", he became alive with this book - he became somebody you know and understand a little bit better with every page. The illustrations are great and brought up many questions from my students.

hi! i am from malaysia my name is derrick chin i haven't read your book yet but i would like to make a better business with looking for something new to doing my own business in malaysia. do you think is it possible you can recomand some to me and give me some opinion ?? actully i am looking for a small business coz my capital is not that much. hope you will get back to me soon. your opinion is much apprecite. thank you

Great gift for people who are adopting. Steven Kellogg is one of our favorite illustrators- makes book very inviting!

Reading juvenile biographies of Franklin Pierce is rather depressing because we are talking about arguably the greatest failure ever to be elected to the Presidency. In this volume for the Our Presidents series author Steven Ferry tries to put the best face on things, calling the first chapter A Promising Start, but the other chapters make it clear the course of Pierce's life: Life in Politics, An Unhappy President, and A Sad Ending. In fact, young readers will discover that most of Pierce's adult life was a sad time. His wife, Jane, disapproved of his life in politics, all three of their sons died; the last in between Pierce's election and inaugural. Pierce served briefly in the U.S. Senate but gave up his seat to practice law in Concord, New Hampshire to please his wife. He turned down the post of Attorney General in the Polk Administration for similar reasons.

Young students reading this juvenile biography will wonder why it was that Pierce was ever nominated for the White House by the Democrats in the first place (actually it was about the 50th place once you counted all the Convention ballots it took). Although he served in the Mexican War, rising from private to brigadier soldier, he was not a war hero; at least, not in the same sense as General Winfield Scott, who was the Whig candidate in 1952. Pierce was selected because Southerners wanted someone who approved of slavery and Northerners appreciated the fact he had not made any enemies in politics, mainly because he had never done anything. However, this was not a good time to be in the White House and the story of Pierce's one time in office is that the slavery issue was threatening to tear the nation in two. His administration accomplished virtually nothing and his ideas for expanding the United States into Central America was rejected. When he sent federal troops to put down the abolitionist government established in "Bleeding Kansas," Democrats refused to re-nominate Pierce in 1956.

I am not sure why Pierce is considered a worse President than his successor, James Buchannan, who also did essentially nothing but put off the coming of the Civil War for a few more years. Ultimately, the personal tragedies of his family life overwhelm the story of his political career. Ferry provides a basic biography of Pierce and in the final analysis tries to focus on the fact he was an honest man who wanted to uphold the Constitution. However, the judgment of history is that Pierce was not able to solve the problem of slavery and probably made things worse.

This is a handsome look volume, filled with photographs and paintings, focusing on the life and times of Franklin Pierce. Each chapter has a sidebar and the fact that these are as likely to be devoted to topics in which Pierce was not involved, such as the attack by Representative Preston Brooks on Senator Charles Sumner in Congress, again speaks to Pierce as a political cipher. As always, the margins have all sorts of interesting facts, such as how the cabin in which Pierce was born is now underwater because a river was dammed to create a lake called Lake Franklin Pierce. This book provides basic biographical information about Pierce, but it is hard to come up with a really interesting book about a fairly uninteresting and extremely unhappy man.

Some of my fondest memories of Ithaca and Cornell are of the Johnson Museum - and not just from my days as a student or a staff member here. My parents (one of whom, by the way, was responsible for publishing this book [here endeth the disclaimer]) were Cornell alums, and brought my brother and me here for the Museum's opening back in the early 1970s, and several other times since.

Apart from the spectacular views from the fifth and sixth floors, the Johnson Museum also affords the visitor a startlingly broad and deep permanent collection of many different genres of art. That collection is represented here in beautiful reproductions, along with excellent text, particularly by Museum Director Frank Robinson and Curator Nancy Green.

Of course nothing can really take the place of an in-person visit to the Johnson Museum (and to Cornell), especially because their seasonal exhibitions are almost always striking and interesting. But for everyone who might remember a rainy Thursday afternoon wandering the galleries, this book is an indispensible trip down fine art's memory lane.