Young Benjamin Franklin wants to be a sailor, but his father won’t hear of it. The other trades he tries — candle maker, joiner, boot closer, turner — bore him through and through. Curious and inventive, Ben prefers to read, swim, fly his kite, and fly his kite while swimming. But each time he fails to find a profession, he takes some important bit of knowledge with him. That tendency is exactly what leads him to become the astonishingly versatile genius we remember today. Inspired by The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Michael J. Rosen’s wry tale captures Ben’s spirit in evocative yet playful language, while illustrations by Matt Tavares follow Ben from the workbench to the water in vivid detail. A love story to the value of variety, A Ben of All Trades sheds light on an unconventional path to greatness and humanizes a towering figure in American history.
A rousing biography from Michael J. Rosen and Matt Tavares reveals how Benjamin Franklin’s boyhood shaped his amazingly multifaceted life.
From the Wall Street Journal: "When Benjamin Franklin was young, he wanted nothing so much as to run away to the sea. 'All Benjamin desired was to be a sailor,' Michael Rosen writes in A Ben of All Trades (Candlewick, 30 pages, $16.99), a picture-book account of the great man’s Boston boyhood. To the exasperation of Ben’s father, though, 'all he appeared to be was an aimless woolgatherer.' In this genial and atmospheric account, the boy’s lack of direction will give readers ages 5-12 a glimpse of a very different world from their own."
