Life of a single man is not a God’s contrived automatic, but a discursive reality and an effervescent changing organism that reinvents itself over the course of time and space. A self-writing man therefore puts himself in the very heart of his own work, trying to examine this serpentine course of his existence, to explore his position in a three-dimensional space and reproduce his life through the surroundings. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first self-writing men who put his life under the close examination both of oneself and the potential readers, having made his Autobiography the first major secular work of the genre in the New World.

The book tells the Benjamin Franklin’s story of starting his career in printing, then through voracious reading becoming an educated author, inventor, scientist, statesman and diplomat. For me the book tells the story of a man who embodied American Dream, showing the readers the possibility of a rise from the lower middle class to the most influential caste on his own example. Though at first the Autobiography was dedicated to his son (“Imagining it maybe equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life…”), it was in the later chapters turned into an account of life and a self-help book for the posterity. But his tale of success is more than just a picture of his life in the eighteenth century America, but an attempt to present an idea of new American nation, and its concept of a model righteous citizen.

Through all 4 chapters of the book, the frantic pieces and sometimes irregular accounts of events, characters, failed and then successful ideas he evolves the concept of that conscious citizen that is vigilant, always ready to defend his principles, who is hard working, diligent and in the end always becomes a winner. With the aim of showing the reader an example of molding one’s own character into a righteous ideal, Franklin combines the text with the list of virtues and charts of a day organizer, which adds a first self-representational practice in American history. Among these virtues are frugality, order, resolution, industry, sincerity etc. This made the Autobiography a real source for gripping everyday ideas to change my daily routine, and bring some insightful clues to making myself more purposeful in pursuing my short-term goals.

It is a well-known fact, that the Autobiography is all about meddling faults: it was written in separate periods (from 1771 to 1788) and not in a single continuous stretch. But apart from Franklin’s forgetfulness about what was written in the previous chapters and his repetitive accounts of some events in his life (“Not having a copy here of what is already written, I know not whether an account is given of the means I used to …”), the story gives the reader a feeling of an author being in the constant evolution. His writing changes through the course of the book which indicates that Franklin becomes older, more sagacious, knowledgeable and prudent. Through the course of the story one gets an idea that people were instruments in shaping Benjamin’s character, so Franklin’s father, Josiah Franklin, bestowed upon his son a magical gift of being fair and preserving; his brother James was the one who made Franklin leave home and undergo extreme changes; Governor Keith was more than a bad man in a good story, he was a liar, and having encountered him Benjamin, forever impressed by false promises, would include the virtue of sincerity in all his works.

Reading Franklin’s Autobiography made me overwhelmed with the sense of a different reality, transformed my everyday surroundings into the time machine traveling hundreds of years to grasp the visions from the past, the performance of each actor, individual and collective object of the eighteenth century America. One of the means for the author to transform a reader’s reality in historical perspective is the language of that period, and the style which he applies to his narrative. Franklin’s prose is very rhetorical, he writes in a sense of a great fashion for that time, which at first gives an idea of his narrative as arrogant and condescending; to eliminate that sense the author switches to colloquial language from time to time to be closer to the ordinary man.

It’s sad, that Franklin never ended his story, never gave an account of an American Revolution, but that doesn’t prevent the book to be sold in millions of copies per year. The book still gives us a chance to gain a fuller essence of Franklin’s youthful weaknesses that he himself turned to strengths in his later years, he was among the first who tramped his predecessors as well as descendants with the first major account of a personal life as a source of learning wisdom by the follies of others.

Treasure in Tahiti by Connie Lee Berry is the second book of the Incredible Journey series. In the first book, we met the Stone family and the Incredible Journey map. A ‘W’ had mysteriously appeared on the map beside the Cayman Islands, where book one’s adventure was.

This adventure takes place in the summer when Mr. Stone has to go to Tahiti for a week long business trip and decides to take the family along. The plan is a family vacation for the first week, and then Mr. Stone will stay for his business week.

Since this was a last minute decision, all had to pack up and leave the next morning. After a long flight to Tahiti and a scary taxi cab ride up a winding mountainous road, the family discovers their vacation cabin has only 3 walls, along with a fire pit, jugs of water and soda, a box of can goods, four cots, and a big mosquito net. The view of the ocean, the private beach, the lush, green forest, and gorgeous sunsets makes up for the hardship.

As in the first book, there is a fact sheet on the Tahiti Islands. Also the science page is how sand filters water and how to make your own sand water filter. Something I didn’t know.

The island adventure starts with ocean fishing, and after catching a small shark we see the Stone family males are not outdoorsmen. Next, Max finds a sealed jar under a floorboard and it contains a map, a treasure map. The treasure is on a small island near by, protected by warnings and a hermit. After solving the puzzling landmarks, the boys found the treasure, which were bonds and gold coins from a bank robbery in 1904. Their reward was a write up in the local newspaper and the vacation hut and land.

This is a good read for the grade school group. There is plenty of fun and adventure with a bit of mystery and pictures and illustrations highlighting the ten chapters. The mysterious map now has an ‘I’ that appeared beside Tahiti. What does this mean? We’ll have to read to whole series to find out.

About the author:

Connie Lee Berry grew up in a small town in Kentucky and after college became a flight attendant for a major airline. After a few years of working for the airline, Connie married and became a mother of three. She became very active in her children’s school activities and doing creative projects. For about five years, she volunteered heavily at her children's schools, even automating a school library at one point. It was during these five years that Mrs. Berry started writing. The idea for the Incredible Journey Books stemmed from a combination of her experiences in her adult life, traveling the world and doing creative kids' projects.