BEN & ME

In Ben & Me - part biography, part travelogue, part personal chronicle - New York Times-bestselling author Eric Weiner follows in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin and plumbs his life for inspiring and useful lessons for the rest of us.

Ben Franklin: one of America's most influential founding fathers, who helped to draft and signed the Declaration of Independence; not only a statesman, he was also a scientist, inventor, diplomat, publisher, and political philosopher. He believed in the American experiment, but he also viewed himself as an experiment in self-improvement. In the spirit of Franklin, Eric Weiner embarked on an ambitious experiment: What if he tried to live his life the way Ben Franklin lived? Thought the way Franklin thought, felt the way Franklin felt. What would such a life look like? (Spoiler alert: It looks darned good.) No straightforward biography, Ben & Me is a guide to living and thinking well, as Ben Franklin did. It is part biography, part travelogue, and part personal chronicle, as Weiner visits Franklin's haunts from Philadelphia to Paris, Boston to London, and attempts to replicate his experiments, large and small. Like Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, Ben & Me is history at its most personal and quirky. It distills the essence of Franklin's ideas into grounded, practical life lessons. We learn how, for instance, you can improve your relationship with someone by inducing them do a favor for you - a psychological phenomenon now known as The Franklin Effect. We learn about the printing press (the Internet of its day), the early postal service, and, of course, electricity. Forbes ranks Franklin as the 89th richest person in US history - what can he teach us about financial management? Ben & Me is and is not about Ben Franklin. It is about curiosity and wonder and diligence and, most of all, the elusive goal of self-improvement. In Franklin's time, to be virtuous was to be a good person in the best sense of the word. Weiner argues that we'd all be better off if we acted, and thought, a bit more like Franklin did, even if he didn't always live up to his own high ideals. Ben & Me reveals how Franklin fathered not only a nation but a way of being: a fierce belief in personal redemption through force of will. Weiner is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God and, his latest book, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers. A former foreign correspondent for NPR, he has reported from more than three dozen countries. His work has appeared in the New Republic, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and the anthology Best American Travel Writing. He lives in Silver Spring, MD with his wife and daughter.