What is an artist, the fine artist, artisan, and a craftsman?

Artist-is an individual who creates products for commercial businesses. Two examples are graphic designers and book illustrators.

Fine Artist-An inherited talent to create original, visual, and beautiful objects of art for aesthetic values. Examples include oil paintings and hand sculptures.

Artisan-independent craftsmen who create projects for both beauty and utility. Two examples are glass blowers or a carpet maker.

Craftsman-Replicates utilitarian objects as a tradesman or craftsman. Examples: carpenters build houses and tradesmen build furniture.

Often people use these words as they choose and not by definition. Misuse of these words cause confusion.

Most important for any artist or artisan is gainful employment. Fine artists have gainful employment during prosperous economies. Their creations are original or one-of-a-kind and the price will be high. People with disposable incomes purchase nonessential works of art.

Craftsman replicates utilitarian type art and work year-round regardless of the economy. People need houses, clothing, shoes, tools, vehicles, furniture, and more compared to owning original jewelry, a statue, or an oil painting.

Artists and artisans need to be entrepreneurs and function as solo business owners or contract employment. Craftsmen or tradesmen work for salaries in larger companies.

My apologies to the unknown library patron whom I forced to return this book so that I could check it out, right before the libraries shut down indefinitely. If I'd known, you could have kept it.

First, this book is long and surprisingly dull for a popular biography. Second, as of page 92, where I finally decided to quit, there was remarkably little historical detail - it focuses in on the biographical aspects to the point that it's almost divorced from history, unusual for a biography of someone who lived more than 200 years ago. Third, it is chock-full of repetitive adoration of Franklin: barely a page passes without our being told that he was pragmatic and that whatever he's doing at the moment illustrates his pragmatic character. Or earnest, canny, frugal, etc. etc. This is especially jarring given that much of the behavior described isn't actually admirable: driving another newspaper editor out of business to clear the field to launch his own paper; writing anonymous letters to his own paper criticizing his competitors and praising himself, including for his restraint in not criticizing his competitors; allowing his wife to be openly nasty to his son, her stepson; and publishing a piece a few weeks after his marriage about how wives need to serve their husbands in everything and "deny yourself the trivial satisfaction of your own will," among many similarly unfortunate exhortations. Isaacson treats all this material uncritically, and I don't have much use for biographies that can't take an honest and balanced look at their subject, however widely loved that person might be. But Isaacson seems too enamored of Franklin's self-improvement schemes, all discussed in great detail, to do so.

At any rate, there are plenty of Franklin biographies out there and I can't say I have much use for this one. If only the library would take it back!

This is an incredibly well researched, detailed account of all aspects of Einstein's life, personal, scientific and political that I can highly recommend to anybody interested. I learned heaps I didn't know and had the record set straight on a number of points, mainly regarding Einstein's political views, how they changed over time and his level of support for setting up the Manhattan Project.

I read the book with a specific research agenda, which was to independently form an opinion as to whether Einstein was autistic, an idea not first suggested by me and not on the author's mind either. Conclusion: Yep, autisticker than an autistic person with autism.

Towards the end there is an account of how Einstein was affected by and responded to McCarthyism. He was opposed, seeing in it the oppression of free speech and free thought characteristic of both Fascism and Communism. The author takes the view that McCarthyism was a passing fad, doomed to fail in the long term because of the greatness of the American Constitution. I found this level of complacency offensive to all the victims of McCarthy, all the people who spoke up in defense of freedoms and all the people who defended the constitution legally.

On it's own the constitution is nothing; without those people willing to risk reputation, career, even liberty, would McCarthyism have been a "passing fad"? Given the current political situation, we need such people more than ever. You disappoint me in this, Isaacson. Einstein, who used his world famous name to stand up for moderation, tolerance and freedom of thought and speech, does not.

Still, overall an excellent book.

Einstein was famously a pacifist but I did not know how publicly outspoken he was about it.

There was a private campaign to prevent Einstein being awarded a Nobel Prize. This seems to have been variously motivated by 1. a bias towards experimentalists 2. an old-timer scepticism of Special (let alone General) Relativity 3. anti-Semitism.

This explains why the photo-electric effect was cited when Einstein eventually won in 1922.