Non Ficiton Book Club to Discuss Book of Ages by Jill Lepore - Thursday, October 1 @ 6:30 PM

Our nonfiction book club is set to discuss an interesting book that tells the lesser known story of one of history’s supporting characters, who so happens to be a woman. The Book of Ages tells the story of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, as much as anything can be known about the person with whom Franklin corresponded the most during his lifetime. The story might seem to be a story about Benjamin but turns out to be much more than that. It’s at once the story of women in early America and of the power of the ordinary characters and daily struggles of the surrounding great figures of history, who are normally drawn to life, if they are drawn at all, in the pages of fiction.

Description from the book jacket:

From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.
Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.

About the Author:

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kempter ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize; Mansion of Happiness, shortlisted for the the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medial for Excellence in Nonficiton, and The Secret History of Wonder Woman winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and their three sons.

This book club is free and open to the public. Copies of Book of Ages and other Non Fiction book club titles are available for patrons to borrow first come first serve at the first floor check out desk. For more info visit http://pollardml.org/events/non-fiction-book-club.