Poor Richard's Lament: A Most Timely Tale

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Brookline, NH 2012 Hardcover First Edition Brand New Brand new hardcover in brand new dustjacket, gift quality. Stated First Edition, FIrst Printing. Very fine. Digiital image ... available upon request. From the internet: "What if Ben Franklin came back to life? What if everything depended on it? Poor Richard's Lament is "A re-imagining of Benjamin Franklin you will not soon forget..." says Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and Steve Jobs. But this is also more than a re-imagining of Franklin. It is a re-imagining of America itself. Where did the cultural legacy of Ben Franklin go wrong? We come to understand this, even as Franklin himself comes to self-realization in this book, during his contentious 'celestial trial' and during his dramatic reintroduction into 21st-century America. Interwoven into Ben's story is a second, beginning in the red-carpeted parlors of the West Wing of the White House and ending in the blood-stained streets of West Philadelphia. Eventually, the parall Read more Show Less

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More About This Book

Overview


Fiction. From the West Wing of the White House to the "Celestial Trial" of Ben Franklin, to the slums of Philadelphia, POOR RICHARD'S LAMENT takes us on a whirlwind tour of time and space. Ben's odyssey begins at his birth site in Boston, passes through New York, and ends, with wrenching poignancy, at his grave site in Philadelphia. Following in the traditions of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with intimations of Dante's Divine Comedy, "POOR RICHARD'S LAMENT, nine years in the making, is an intricately woven, ultimately uplifting tale of revelations and redemption.

Editorial Reviews

VOYA
Two hundred years after his death, Benjamin Franklin languishes in the Plantation of the Unrepentant, awaiting a hearing in the Celestial Court and confident that his well-known record of earthly accomplishments will grease his way into the halls of the blessed. The long-delayed proceeding, however, proves a shock, as his adversaries present countering evidence of neglect of family, self-aggrandizement, questionable business dealings, and other malfeasances. Instead of being consigned to the nether regions, as he begins to fear, Ben finds himself back in the twenty-first century United States, with a chance to redeem himself by acting, instead of just writing, wisely. His journey takes him from his birthplace, Boston, to his gravesite in Philadelphia, encountering along the way various people whom he can counsel or aid. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a top advisor to the president plots against a rival candidate, a conspiracy ending in a devastating collision with Ben's odyssey. The author offers a promising idea with much potential. The book's appeal for young adults is limited, however, by the volume's length and archaic language used to express Franklin's thoughts and conversations. This is especially true of the drawn-out depiction of the trial. It is work to read in spite of action and quirky, appealing individuals aplenty. Not many teen readers would have enough interest or perseverance to wade through six-hundred-plus pages or keep track of sixty-plus characters. With fine historical fiction in fulsome supply, libraries can find plenty of more accessible and less expensive titles. Reviewer: Kathleen Beck
Michael Zuckerman
At a time when a host of economic and social ills is causing many of us to contemplate a world beyond materialism and narcissism, Poor Richard’s Lament juices up the process with an ever-building sense of moral urgency. Where to begin to sing the praises of this singular work?...Fitzgerald is that rarest of birds: a great writer and a great soul...A grand and gorgeous book! The pleasures of prose, passion, and intelligence pervade these pages.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780984592135
  • Publisher: Hobblebush Books
  • Publication date: 1/17/2012
  • Pages: 640
  • Sales rank: 841,190
  • Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.80 (d)

Meet the Author


Tom Fitzgerald experienced a Huckleberry Finn childhood near the confluence of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River before undertaking formal studies in physics, mathematics, law, industrial management, and English. He has served as a door-to-door salesman of home-study courses, a vocational counselor for adults and children with developmental disabilities, a stockbroker, the assistant to the president of a large healthcare corporation, a lobbyist, a technical writer, and a corporate manager. In the latter two capacities, his employers have included AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, NEC, IBM/Lotus Development and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Tom served as a Navy UDT/SEAL during the Vietnam era, and has swum several long distances, including across the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Once also an avid runner, Tom ran the Boston Marathon three times before a fall on black ice abruptly ended a lifelong addiction to endorphins. He and his wife of 44 years, a marriage and family therapist, live in New England. They have three grown sons and three grandsons.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
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  • Posted February 2, 2012

    But for an overpriced pennywhistle, a man¿and a work¿and a war¿ might¿ve been lost

    POOR RICHARD'S LAMENT is not a book for wimps — let me be perfectly honest from the outset. Michael W. Zuckerman’s comprehensive Foreword makes this declaration all too clear. But good Ben Franklin was no wimp himself — as Tom Fitzgerald’s exhaustive “Milestones in the Life of Benjamin Franklin” makes equally clear. And so, let the clang of Caveat Lector! ring loud and clear.

    The truth is, the plot of POOR RICHARD'S LAMENT twists and turns at so many corners, one could fill a second book — an exegetical work, if you will — with nothing more than signposts to the reader to help out with directions. Up, down, sideways, back and forth over time…one feels the need of a map — or at least of a compass. Simple annotations, unfortunately, won’t do.

    And the language? Have I mentioned the language? Each time we enter Fitzgerald’s Supreme Court of Petitions, he reconstructs the language of Ben Franklin’s day in a manner worthy of a Swift or a Fielding. When he jumps back into the 20th (or sometimes the 21st) century, however, we’re once again safely ‘at home’ with the shorthand, telegraphic style of contemporary politicians, drug dealers, derelicts, and other assorted miscreants. The transition is sometimes jarring to a reader’s nerves, but never contrived or hackneyed. No, Fitzgerald is a master of both worlds — but woe to the reader who slips into the roiling waters of this writer’s perfervid imagination if he or she can’t swim (or at least tread) the distance!

    Is Fitzgerald a stylist of the first rank? I cite, from page 233, this fulmination of the good Examiner Adams by way of an unrelenting condemnation of Ben Franklin’s comportment over the years vis-à-vis his own family — in this particular case, towards his ailing wife. To wit:

    “Or do we attempt to weave unto whole cloth here too much by way of warp, too little by way of weft?”

    This is merely one of hundreds of skillful stylistic fusillades Fitzgerald launches at Franklin out of the mouths of his Examiners, the smoke and roar of whose oratorical cannons would seem to fill the small chamber of the Supreme Celestial Court of Petitions with enough histrionic fire and brimstone to cause asphyxiation.

    If masterful prose can be defined as exhibiting a combination of ‘economy and grace’ (not to mention ‘drama’), count me among those who’d happily suggest that the above aptly demonstrates Fitzgerald’s mastery of them all.

    By way of conclusion to this review, I feel compelled to confess that I was finally able, just over a year ago (owing to circumstances more of penury than of opportunity), to read Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's DON QUIXOTE. The likeness of Fitzgerald’s Ben Franklin to the ‘Knight of the Mournful Countenance’ had already occurred to me on numerous occasions while reading POOR RICHARD'S LAMENT — both in character and in circumstance. Consequently, when I read Fitzgerald’s apt analogy (on p. 521) — to wit: “the specter of an eighteenth-century knight charging about on a twenty-first century Rocinante,” I happily realized that my instincts were not entirely at odds with those of the author. The preeminence of Tom Fitzgerald’s opus comes perhaps closest of anything I’ve read in the past fifty years to the grandeur of Cervantes’ opus — and I believe DON QUIXOTE, still considered to be the first novel ever written, also to be the greatest novel ever written. I don’t know that I could pay any greater compliment to Tom Fitzgerald’s POOR RICHARD'

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  • Posted January 7, 2012

    Poor Richard's Lament is an excellent survey of modern America through the ironic eyes of founder Benjamin Franklin! It is Tom Fitzgerld's Magnus opus!

    Poor Richard’s Lament is a new 600 page novel from the pen of novelist Tom Fitzgerald. The author is a renaissance man who has expertise in many fields: physics, mathematics, law, English Literature and philosophical inquiry. Fitzgerald has served as a Navy Seal, raced in the Boston Marathon and written several novels. This book is his Magnus opus. It is a magisterial inquiry into the life of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most complex figures in all the span of American history.
    The premise of the book: Dr. Franklin has been confined for over two centuries in a tiny apartment in the Plantation of the Unrepentant. He is accused of hypocrisy and is finally given his day in judicial court proceeding. He is quizzed by John Adams the starchy puritan who never warmed up to Franklin; the Rev. William Smith of Boston and the Rev. William Smith, who disdains Franklin’s agnostic belief system.
    Franklin is found to be a founder who has committed many follies in his long life. Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. Ben ran away from home at an early age. During his long life he was a renaissance man of genius who accomplished much. He was a printer, newspaper editor, musician, painter, politician, scientist (his famous kite flying experiment proved that lightning and electricity were the same), diplomat, wit, essayist and bon vivant in the sumptuous salons of Parisian aristocrats. Some say he was also a “babe magnet.” His Poor Richard’s Almanac was widely printed and quoted in colonial British America. Franklin worked with Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence; served as the United States’ first ambassador to France (where he wangled Louis XVI to help fund the American Revolution, thereby bankrupting France and leading to the French Revolution of 1789). The sage Franklin’s late- life Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has been a best seller for over 200 years.
    Yet Franklin was far from perfect! He left his common law wife back home in Philadelphia while he spent long years in Paris and London. He may have involved himself in many affairs with lush ladies living overseas. He had a difficult and stormy relationship with son William. The young man was a loyalist to Britain during the Revolution earning the ire of Daddy Ben. His record on slavery and political hypocrisies are also discussed in detail.

    Franklin is not sentenced by the tribunal to the cosmic abyss but instead is set down in modern 21st century urban America. He is dressed in 18th century garb as he revisits his old haunts in major American cities, especially Boston, Philadelphia and New York.
    While Fitzgerald traces Franklin’s visit to our modern nation he also examines a subplot in which a heated and corrupt political campaign over the presidency is being conducted. In this part of the book we see exposed religious and personal hypocrisy on a large scale. Fitzgerald is obviously sickened by the state of politics in this nation of over 300 million citizens.
    And what of Franklin’s observations and lessons the reader learns from his journey to our century? This reviewer discerns the following major themes:
    • We are an isolated nation--faces in the crowd who live lives of what Thoreau would call “quiet desperation.”
    • Fitzgerald tells the story of several poor persons living in the jungles of the big city; issues dealing with health care and mental health are painted in detail.
    • American culture has degenerated since the days of Franklin. Our music, political disco

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  • Posted January 3, 2012

    Wonderful Read, wonderful lessons. Check it out!

    I have read many books on a wide range of topics and have been invited to review several. But not until I read Poor Richard's Lament did I feel compelled to write one. This is a most unusual tale, written in an 18th century high-minded and forceful style which compares sharply with the now prevalent street vernacular, and is replete with historical facts about Benjamin Franklin - the person - which are virtually unknown and unappreciated in today's sound-bite culture. It's this other side of Mr. Franklin that we may recognize in ourselves, like it or not - the one that contrasts the saying and the doing, the one that forces us to recognize and regret the not doing. But wait. This tale is not of the currently popular "hero expose" genre toppling growing numbers of America's Formative Leaders from the Mount. In this tale, Mr. Franklin actually returns from the "cask" to turn his wisdom and wit to social issues unsurprisingly similar to those of 200 years ago.............thereby forcing us to see clearly, like it or not. Poor Richard's Lament is a wonderfully crafted and challenging read, from Ben-on-stage to Ben-on-"Sloan". I, for one, came away from this timely tale impressed with Tom Fitzgerals's labors, with undiminished high regard for Mr. Franklin, with heightened sensitivity towards regret, and with a path to redemption.

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  • Posted January 2, 2012

    Soul-searching America

    Poor Richard¿s Lament could not be a more timely, eloquent, and capable invitation for humanity in general and Americans in particular to re-discover what brings real peace and happiness into our lives: making it our top priority to be good to one another, regardless of the cost to the ambitions and appetites of the ego. America in particular has made the latter its chief priority, which is in no small measure why we find our nation so lost and troubled in present times, and we took this path in large part due to the seminal influence of founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin.

    In this novel, Franklin¿s life is examined in extraordinary detail to reveal the ways in which a man viewed as a high achiever and example of the American Spirit nevertheless made many painful mistakes when in came to the service of his fellow human beings. He is given the chance at redemption, to which he applies all of the wit, drive, and creativity he so often misapplied in his former life, and thus provides a new example for America to follow. He dispenses with the mindset of Industry, Frugality, and Expediency, and ushers in the hope of a new age of Compassion, Generosity, and Understanding.

    PRL is written with uncommon love for and attention to language, story, and character, and nearly every page sparkles with insight and wisdom. Rarely will you witness a character so exquisitely rendered as Benjamin Franklin is in these pages, and his palpable, charismatic presence lends the book an authority which will penetrate the heart and challenge the reader to re-examine their own life¿and they will be the better for it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 1, 2012

    A Truly Great American Novel

    This is one of the better American novels I've ever read. Yes, I am the author's son, so you'll consider the source. But I don't think I'm biased. Tom Fitzgerald has published three other novels, all of which I've read, and I don't rank them in the first tier of American literature. This one I do.

    It's probably the character of Ben Franklin that I like best about Poor Richard's Lament. Fitzgerald's Ben is utterly real, and becomes heartbreakingly beloved to the reader as his journey unfolds, both because of and despite his three-dimensionality. Perhaps the second most notable virtue of the novel is its deeply affecting moral urgency. The stakes of this tale are as high as the stakes of human society A.D. 2012, and the reader feels it.

    Poor Richard's Lament is also a delicious feast of language. Every single sentence is polished to a high sheen. Fitzgerald's prose is another's poetry. Lastly, if this novel had nothing else going for it besides its particular manifestation of the author's imagination, which begins with the most compelling vision of an after-world I've encountered in literature and continues through a Dickensian tying-together of disparate narrative threads at the tale's denouement, it would still qualify as a triumph.

    As it is, this masterpiece has not just that but everything going for it.

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  • Posted January 1, 2012

    A Must Read for History Buffs

    I loved it. Fitzgerald has explored the nooks and crannies of Franklin¿s life to reveal a side of the great man we never knew. He¿s magically woven these into a rich tale of hard-earned redemption borne by regrets about his family life, his stance on slavery and even some of his business dealings. The prose is beautiful.

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