Simply and clearly for young readers, Irmengarde Eberle has written the story of Benjamin Franklin's life, from the humble days of his Boston boyhood until he died as an elderly man, known and honored around the world.She has drawn a picture of a man of humor, humanity, and many accomplishments. Here the reader sees Franklin as writer, printer, newspaper editor, businessman, public-spirited citizen, family man, leader in the American fight for freedom, ambassador from the New World to the Old; but most of all Benjamin Franklin emerges as an inventor and a scientist-a person with an original and questing mind, interested in electricity, oceanography, meteorology, and medicine; a man who unceasingly sought the "whys" in the natural world around him, and from whose pioneering scientific findings other early scientists drew inspiration.