Good reading for the holidays: Christmas shopping? The perfect gift may be as close as the nearest bookstore.

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Book Review

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Good reading for the holidays: Christmas shopping? The perfect gift may be as close as the nearest bookstore.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 590 pages, Simon & Schuster, $30

After completing his first draft of the Declaration of Independence on June 21, 1776, Thomas Jefferson sent the document down the street to let Benjamin Franklin have a look. What happened next is described by Walter Isaacson in his new book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

"Franklin made only a few changes.... The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson's phrase 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable' and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.'"

That single edit, Isaacson notes, turned the historic assertion of man's inalienable rights from a vaguely religious one into one of firm rationality. It changed the whole tenor of the document.

But then Isaacson goes on to explain where Franklin got the idea in the first place.

He borrowed the notion of...

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