Customer Reviews (1)

great illustrations, inspiring story
People have heard of Thomas Paine. They may know he wrote something called Common Sense, and that it inspired colonists in America to support a revolution, but this biography teaches young readers just how innovative and influencial he was. It includes lots of interesting details about his life and ideas. He was the firsst person to use the term United States of America in print!
The illustrations in this book add interest too. They are black and white watercolors that truly fit the feel of the history, and make the text more fun to read. They express the moods of the changing times, excitement,conviction, fear, and hope. I particularly enjoyed the street scenes!
Recommended, and enjoyed! ... Read more

Book Description
Despite being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase “United States of America,” and the author of three of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine is perhaps the least well known – and the most controversial – of the American founding fathers. Unlike such friends and allies as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams, the world’s first crusader for the public good has always remained a somewhat indistinct figure. How this lower- class British tradesman managed not only to have written the cornerstone of American democracy, Common Sense, but become a revered citizen of the world are questions that have challenged historians for centuries, and have more often than not left us with biographies that are more monumental than illuminating.

In Craig Nelson’s Thomas Paine we now have a rich and vivid portrait that does justice to this towering figure of our history, one that brings him to life against the dramatic backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the heady intellectual exhilaration of the Age of Enlightenment. Nelson traces Paine’s path from his years as a struggling London mechanic to his journey to seek his fortune in the New World (in which he arrived on a stretcher, after a nearly deadly bout of shipboard typhus); from his early career as a crusading pamphleteer to his emergence as the heroic voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents; from his miraculous escape from execution in Paris during The Terror to his final years in America, where the once-lionized patriot spent his final days nearly impoverished and in the throes of dementia. Throughout his insightful portrait Nelson takes full account of this paradoxical figure, whom some contemporaries judged as brilliant and charismatic and others disparaged as abrasive and egotistical, a cherished patriot who was nonetheless dismissed by John Adams as a “disastrous meteor” and Teddy Roosevelt as a “dirty little atheist.”

Five years in the making, drawing on both the most recent scholarship and the archives of Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Paris, London, Lewes, and Thetford, Thomas Paine restores this often misunderstood man to the stature that he deserves, and reveals him, a man who famously asserted that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” to be as much a man of our own time as a paragon of the Enlightenment. BACKCOVER: “Thomas Paine has had many biographers, but this is the first book to recover him in his own electrical style. Nelson's account brings Paine to life with all the flaws and foibles flaming away amidst the greatness. The story is poignant and the prose is incandescent.”
—Joseph J. Ellis, author, most recently, of His Excellency: George Washington ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

One of the boldest of the revolutionaries
"Thomas Paine" by Craig Nelson is a thoughtful yet entertaining biography of the Revolutionary War hero Thomas Paine. Positioning Paine within the intellectual vanguard of the Age of Enlightenment, Mr. Nelson demonstrates the crucial role that Paine played in inspiring the colonists' radical struggle for independence. This carefully researched and accessible work succeeds in reintroducing readers to a remarkable man who dedicated his life to human progress through politics.

Mr. Nelson bookends the narrative with the strange tale of Paine's bones which were first recovered by William Cobbett and then sold and resold many times over. This particular narrative serves as a metaphor underscoring the changing opinions that posterity has attributed to Paine; indeed, we learn that Cobbett was virulently opposed to Paine's democratic principles during Paine's lifetime only to later became an ardent admirer after Paine's death. No doubt Cobbett was not unusual for his varying reactions to a message that helped set in motion a series of profound socio-political changes throughout the transatlantic world.

Mr. Nelson's solid scholarship and vivid prose helps us imagine Paine passionately debating the great issues of the day with his fellow revolutionaries. Paine appears as one of the boldest and most visionary of his peers, publicly calling for an end to slavery, supporting women's rights and envisioning a welfare state at a time when most others were silent on these issues. Of course, it was Paine's remarkable talent in transcribing Enlightenment ideals into fiery populist rhetoric that made him indispensible, helping to win broad support for a cause that faced significant challenges and memorably rallying the soldiers at a particularly dark moment in the war.

But Mr. Nelson takes Paine's story well beyond this familiar terrain to England and France, where Paine continued to risk all for the principles he held dear. Mr. Nelson makes clear that Paine was immersed in the kind of political turmoil and intrigue that makes today's world seem rather tame by comparison, including a narrow escape from England after authoring the seditious 'Age of Reason' and a remarkable stint in the French legislature where his principled stand for human dignity and democracy ended with a brutal imprisonment. Through it all, Paine became the 18th Century's most widely read author, pointing the way forward for the great mass of people through the Age of Revolution into today's democratic world that, in many ways, has yet to fulfill Paine's utopian vision.

Tragically, Paine's unyielding defense of reason earned the enmity of small-minded religious demagogues who propagandized against the defenseless Paine in posterity. Fortunately, Mr. Nelson's book joins several other more recent works that correct this unjust historic distortion, helping to restore Paine to his proper place among the Founding Fathers as one of their most uncompromising and important leaders.

The Forgotten Founding Father
Nelson does a thorough job in exploring Mr. Paine's life.Of interesting note is that the pace of the book seems to mimic the waxing and waning of Mr. Paine's alleged mental illness and bouts with alcohol....as do Mr. Paine's writings.No doubt Thomas Paine's inability to sustain consistent relationships had something to do with his personality and mental illness.One of the few criticisms of the book I have is Nelson's jumping back and forth in the time period without putting in the occasional date as a point of reference. I also wished he had explored the contentious relationsip between Gouverneur Morris and Paine a little more thoroughly. Overall the book is a good read.Not only does it give the reader a better view of this important figure in American History it also provides a glimpse into the difficult lives of people during that period in regards to living wages, debt, and travel.

author twists Paine's thought to fit his own silly political biases
Why is it that biographers cannot simply stick to the facts and dispense with attempting to tie all historical "heros" to their own modern political beliefs. This is a classic example of that exercise.

Most of this book is a fairly interesting and well written biography of Tom Paine. However, you will need to ignore the occasional short comments foreshadowing the completely nonsensical concluding chapter making Paine out the first coming of the modern day liberal. I strongly recommend skipping the last chapter where the author concludes that Paine shared the author's dizzy loony left-wing opinions.

Anyone with even a slight grasp of historical reality would recognize the idiocy of the contention that good ole Tom Paine was a politically correct left wing simpleton leading the way to the current day empty-headed liberalism of Rosie O'Donnell, author Craig Nelson and other left wing pinheads.

The Keane biography is more comprehensive, not as well written, but you don't have to suffer through a series of conclusions about how "modern day" liberal - as opposed to "classical" liberal (boy is there a difference) Paine actually was. Paine would be disgusted at what passes for liberalism in this day and age. And quite frankly equally disgusted with modern conservatism for that matter.

Nelson's is only the latest in the twisted search to prove that Paine was a basically a modern day liberal. Not surprisingly Eric Foner's abominable biography of Paine is even worse.

Skip this idiotic exercise in historical fantasy. I was fooled into buying this nonsense from a positive review in a libertarian publication. I suspect or at least hope that the reviewer did not read the last chapter in this travesty when he (or she, I forget which) recommended it.

Soul of a Revolution(ary)
This brillant biography of one of our country's mostly forgotten Founding Fathers is an absolute must for anyone who wants to understand where America came from (and how it has gone astray).

Better than than McCollough's bio of John Adam's, this book really gives the reader the experience of the dichotomy that existed at this country's founding (and where the Federalists drove us off the path of real individual freedom.)

A greatbook
I hadn't read much by or about Payne before reading this book. This book shows the importance of Payne and other enlightenment thinkers to the American and French revolutions. While Payne would eventually be denounced as too radical he was always true to his enlightenment principles.This book really showed how the emerging middle class bought into the era's "enlightenment" ideals and the effect that had in America and France.Great book!! ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (14)

A Timely Treasure
When I ordered this book I was thinking of updating my knowledge of one of that group of men we usually think of as our "forefathers"--the ones who were there at the birth of our nation.I got that AND SO MUCH MORE.In addition to learning more of Thomas Paine himself, I learned why he has never had the place of distinction and honor accorded others of his time despite his seemingly crucial activities in securing our independence.THEN, this fine historian takes the "essence" of this dynamic American, traces its ( and his) waxing and waning influence through the decades, and presents us with the need to re-capture, if we can, that zeal for maintaining our freedom and our "national theme" of a nation for the common good--for the common man.For me, anyway:A Masterpiece. The only drawback (if one can call it that):Now I MUST read ( and own) the basic works--in Thomas Paine's own words

Common Sense Society of Fort Lee NJ
This is a brilliant work that breathes new life into the legacy of Tom Paine and links his writings to our lives as Americans today.We in the Borough of Fort Lee, New Jersey are proud that Paine began to write "The American Crisis" while in Fort Lee as an aide to General Nathaniel Greene.The retreat to victory through New Jersey in November 1776 was one of the darkest periods of the American Revolution.Paine's words in The Crisis inspired this young nation so much so that General Washington had "The Crisis" read by his offcers to his men prior to the crossing of the Delaware.

We in Fort Lee are presently forming "The Common Sense Society" to promote the ideals of Tom Paine and to work with the Borough of Fort Lee to erect a statue to Paine in our Monument Park where Paine encamped with the American Army in 1776.This would be only the sixth statue of Paine in the world and the fourth in the United States.

Well written but biased and flawed argument
Kaye's prose is solid and I certainly enjoyed the first few chapters on Paine's controversial life. The book, however, takes a turn for the worse when it launches (for half the book!) into a very oversimplified argument that "liberals" (of all times, shapes, and persuasions) are the true decendents of Paine's ideology and that conservatives (over and over derided as "the powers that be" "capitalist elites" etc.) can never truly draw from Paine's legacy. Quite the contrary, Kaye admits that Paine's libertarian tendencies and his disdain for government, contradicting his own argument. An interesting read, but disgustingly biased and as a previous post commented, should be on the shelf with other political polemics. Wouldn't recommend it to an objective student of history looking for a good intro to Paine.

More than a Biography

Although I purchased this book assuming it was a biography of Paine, I discovered it was much more. While the first third of the book is a short, excellent biography, the heart if the book is a study of Paine's influence on American's liberal, progressive, radical movements and even of the Reagan conservative revival.Kaye makes it clear that his sympathies lie with the left and views Reagan's reliance on Paine's words as a highjacking, but despite this bias, the book is an objective analyses of Paine's influence throughout the 230 years of American history. One question, I have oftenasked is why did the conservative elite of the Colonial Era, who had so much to lose if the Revolution failed, pledge the "their lives, their fortunes and scared honor" to the cause of American Independence?Kaye offers a plausible and logical explanation: the influence of Thomas Paine's pamphlets, most notably "Common Sense.".

Good story, poor writing
Good review of the life and times of an often over-looked founders but it's often hard to follow the disorganized and disjointed style of the author. ... Read more

Book Description

"An interesting perspective on Paine as a `secular preacher.'... Drawing from a wide range of Paine's writings, Fruchtman explores three broad themes in Paine's writing: nature, action, and progress... It will be difficult to read Common Sense again without thinking of its masterly protagonist as homilist."--Albert H. Wurth, Jr., Journal of American History.

"No book in print does a better--or even comparable--job of laying out Paine's doctrine and tracing the web of his ideas."--Wilson Carey McWilliams, Rutgers University.

Book Description
Thomas Paine has been celebrated for his role in persuading the American colonists to revolt against Britain and declare their independence.At the same time,however, scholars have generally dismissed his writings as propaganda. This book demonstrates that Paine was a skilled and sophisticated writer and thinker who transformed political literature in the late eighteenth century by creating a new literature of politics that bridged political philosophy and the everyday, common-sensical knowledge of ordinary people. The impact of this new political language would be remarkable as it energized a mass public to participate in the arena of politics, an arena from which they had been excluded. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Debate Around Paine
One of the finest accounts ever written about the debate (scholar Jerry Knutson called it "the RAGE") around Tom Paine. Paine spurred debate from the time of his earliest well-known work, COMMON SENSE, to his death in 1809. Most Americans are utterly unaware of the historical newspaper debates and the rancorous controversy that descended upon Paine when he returned from taking part in -- and nearly losing his life -- in the French Revolution; the many works written in reply to his AGE OF REASON; the outrage and venom precipitated by his LETTER TO GEORGE WASHINGTON, or the part that Paine played in the fight for freedom of the press in Britain and his contributions to natural philosophy and the language of science. These are just a few of the issues which Prof. Larkin takes on in his sweeping treatment of Paine's language, ideology, and the controversies they sparked.

Larkin explains how Paine created a new kind of reader in America and, in so doing, made his own works some of the most influential and greatest selling works in history. Moreover, this book affirms Paine's status as an important transatlantic intellectual who could translate the major political theories of the eighteenth-century into the language of the common man. Larkin's literary approach to his subject is complimented by sound historical research and acute analysis.

Along with a good index and rich bibliography, this work is readable and valuable both to the advanced scholar and to the average reader in search of an understanding of the part played by the greatest agitator of them all, Tom Paine, in the origins of democratic reform. ... Read more

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Book Description
"There can be no doubt that Gregory Claeys..has written by far the best study so far of the thought of Tom Paine...Claeys shows that he was a more significant political theorist than is usually admitted...This is a satisfying and authoritative book." - Journal of The Historical Association Thomas Paine is the most comprehensive and incisive study of the social and political thought of one of the most important political writers of the modern era; it is also the first account to consider Paine with due seriousness as a political thinker. Gregory Claeys concentrates on Paine's most influential work (and one of the best-known political tracts of all time) the Rights of Man. He is careful, however, to place this work in the context of the evolution of Paine's thinking from his early American writings, and against a background of natural law and rights writings, republicanism and radicalism, and Paine's Quaker and deist beliefs. The book has three major strengths. First, it brings together debates amongst historians about Paine's American and European works and periods, and demonstrates the underlying consistency in Paine's thought. Second, Gregory Claeys considers at length the British reception of the Rights of Man, the immense controversy the text engendered, and the successful efforts to stifle the growth of the radical parliamentary reform movement that it inspired. Third, the characterization and discussion of Paine's ideas is considerably more sophisticated than any existing analysis, and presents in effect a completely new view of Paine that will serve as the standard interpretation. ... Read more

Book Description
Commentator Hitchens reveals how Thomas Paines "Rights of Man" forms the philosophical cornerstone of the worlds most powerful republic: the United States of America. Unabridged. 4 CDs. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (10)

How to teach history!
Moncure Conway might have been the most fascinatingcharacter ever created for a historical fiction, for this book is both about him as well as Tom Paine. In fact, the book is almost incidentally about Tom Paine when he was alive. The focus is on Tom Paine, dead.
The book is well written, often very funny, and would be my textbook of choice if I were teaching high school or college history.
All-in-all, it's a book that is hard to put down!

Boooooring
The first section of the book is about Paine's final years and his body and what happened to it. Interesting stuff. This is what the blurbs in Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere said.

But then the author seems to get way too into all the connections between so-and-so and seems to really forget that he was writing about Thomas Paine. So so-and-so met Walt Whitman, and they both knew H.D. Thoreau, and Thoreau knew so-and-so...then all of a sudden, fast forward to this religious pacifist and a nutty pseudo-doctor and...

By page 130 I began thumbing through page after page looking for a mention of Paine. There's tons on the popularity of the toilet in the late 1800s, and on phrenology and on women's rights (ok ok, so the Paine tie-in there is that some early feminists used "Common Sense" as a springboard for other progressive ideals, including feminism and abolitionism, etc.).

Honestly, the majority of the book fails, in my mind, to remain interesting in relation to Paine. Extensive research into esoteric pseudo-science and the invention of the water closet may be interesting, but when I pick up a book about the strange afterlife and times of Thomas Paine, I expect there to be a bit more of a connection to Thomas Paine.

No?

Not all who wander are lost: An exhilarating, fascinating diagonal trip through history.
This very readable book put me in mind of James Burke's wonderful Connections, but centers around the mortal remains and intellectual legacy of Thomas Paine. I love the usual sort of history, but these "diagonal" journeys, going off in strange directions, really help pull history together and illuminate the oddities that are usually left out. Whether or not we arrive at any definite place, the trip is well worth it.Looking at history as a purposeful march from there to here leaves out so many fascinating might-have-beens. We so often end up looking at earlier times merely as a prelude to ours, not seeing the perspective of earler generations as their chaotic, multi-sidedstruggle for their own present and future.

This is not for everyone: I find that many of my favorite books are lambasted by reviewers outraged that the author has not given us a clear and definitive answer to the identity of Shakespeare or Perkin Warbeck, the guilt of Lizzie Borden, the fate of the Princes in the Tower, but rather has tossed about ideas and possibilities. Perhaps it is too scary to contemplate that there may never be a final answers.This is not a biography of Paine, it begins with his final, ailing years and death. It is not for those who want a crisp, linear narrative.

Paul Collins jumps between past and present as he tracks his subjects.This is a risky strategy, and I was often surprised to find myself in another era. On the whole, I think it worked very well - it created a vivid impression of the layers of history and the disappearance of the past.In some ways, it is a metaphor for history writing: conjuring what no longer exists.

Collins moves around England and America trying to resolve the mystery of the fate of Paine's body. At the same time, he traces Paine as seen by later generations: the "author" of a posthumous autobiography, whose publisher employed John Brown before he went to Kansas and thence to Harper's Ferry. Along the way, Collins tells us about formerly famous people who are at best footnotes in our time; the invention of the indoor toilet; the function of the rag-and-bone man; a corpse as property; and a great deal about phrenology. This last topic is developed sympathetically at great length, stressing its original purpose as an aid to self-improvement.

The reader who is not familiar with Paine should at least read a good encyclopedia article, but a full biography is probably not necesary.

A mind-bending and thought-provoking book.The book is not really scholarly, that is, discussions of ideologies are informative but not in depth.In lieu of a bibliography or notes, the author has sections discussing the sources for each chapter, often imparting more fascinating tidbits along the way.An index would have been nice.

For those who like the juggling of ideas and possibilities, I recommend Who Wrote Shakespeare? by John F. Michell, The Perfect Prince by Anne Wroe, Forty Whacks by David Kent and Royal Blood by Bertram Fields.

A Hilarious and Gruesome Chase through History
For the last part of his life, and since his death in 1809, Founding Father Tom Paine has not gotten his share of respect.His _Common Sense_ of 1776 sold thousands of copies and incited the colonists to a willingness to fight for their liberty.It does not, surprisingly, mention George III by name, but is a broader rejection of rule by royalty.Paine's great problem, however, was that he promoted liberty also from what he thought of as the vengeful and imaginary God of the Bible.He was blasted as an atheist during his lifetime and afterwards, although that label was not true; like many of the most famous Founding Fathers, he was a deist, but infamy came to him since he was outspoken in his rejection of the Judeo-Christian God in his book _The Age of Reason_.Paine did a huge amount for the cause of American liberty, but at his funeral there were only six mourners, and his monument was desecrated thereafter.And then Paine became one of the liveliest of corpses.In _The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine_ (Bloomsbury), Paul Collins has dug into mountains of forgotten lore and examined the lives of one oddball after another who laid claim to Paine's bones, or to his desiccated brain.Collins is a wonderful storyteller, with a charming dry wit to tell us about this macabre journey, but also about his difficulties and triumphs as he hunts the modern locales where parts of the story took place.His account lurches from present to past and back, but Collins eventually clears up the temporal confusions which are part of the fun of the ride.

Paine's corpse was transported by a friend from New York to New Rochelle to be buried in the unconsecrated corner of a farm there, which happened to be near a cottage Paine once owned.Ten years later, the site had lost its marker, but a group of men found it late one night and started digging.They were a crew headed by Englishman William Cobbett, a failed clerk and marine who had become a pamphleteer.He hated Franklin and Jefferson, and especially Paine, but upon reading Paine again years later, became a fan, and wanted his remains: "These bones will effect the reformation of England in church and state," he boasted.Paine's remains, however, failed to be much of an inspiration or a money-getter.They remained in Cobbett's house, and at his death proved an enigma for the estate auctioneer who indignantly said he never dealt in human flesh.Eventually, they were pursued by Moncure Conway, a Virginian who had originally been a defender of slavery, became an itinerant Methodist minister, became inspired by Emerson, and went to Harvard, eventually becoming a Unitarian preacher in England.But Conway eventually realized as he sought whatever was left of Paine that as the remains traded hands, bits and pieces were being kept by previous owners, or taken away as curios by souvenir seekers.The body had become impossibly scattered.

But not entirely scattered.While most of the bits of Paine are gone forever (which has not prevented apocryphal reports of their turning up in all sorts of places), a few secure specimens remain, notably a piece of his brain the size of an India-rubber eraser.It was deposited eventually in a bust of Paine, perched ungainly upon an obelisk, which was put upon the site of Paine's original burial plot near his cottage.Well, not the plot itself, which has been covered over by sidewalk, and no longer near Paine's cottage, which has been moved away, and the monument itself had to be moved because of a road-building project... and on and on until it is hard to understand just what we can make of the past.This is the point of Collins's amusing book.Cultural memory, like individual memories, is faulty: "We forget _all the time_.Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbage."And so have been thrown out all the bits of Paine, and among the scatterers have been a very peculiar cast, with each of which Collins romps while introducing us.There's Orson Fowler the phrenologist and his collection of plaster heads.There is the crusading physician Edward Bliss Foote who irrepressibly insisted on educating Americans about sex, thus earning the first attempted indictment by moralist Anthony Comstock.You will be introduced to the Muggletonians ("They were the world's laziest cult, and assumed that anyone meant to join them would eventually find them somehow.") and to the psychics who enabled Tom Paine to keep writing long after his death.You will be informed of at least some of the rules of that most confusing of games, Mornington Crescent.It is a jubilant jumble, ghoulish and hilarious, but also a thought-provoking meditation on history and memory.

Documented Ephemera (ironic, no?)
This is book is info-tainment of the highest level. It has an NPR quality that some might find unfortunate (you can almost hear Tortoise playing in between some of the paragraphs and chapters), but it works. It succesfully strikes a balance between Mr. Collins' more memoirish SIXPENCE HOUSE and NOT EVEN WRONG with the historical oddities of BANVARDS FOLLY.

As other reviewers have mentioned, THE TROUBLE WITH TOM is not just a mystery about where the remains of Tom Paine ended up. It also connects how the ideas of Tom Paine affected people and their works from the enlightenment to rationalism with how ideas, histories, and even corporeal remains are lost through time.

To accomplish this Collins lays out the articulation of a legacy through the hisotories of forgotten people and the specific conditions of the time. He remains wry yet enthralled as he follows one path to the end and then returns to an earlier one.

This skipping back and forth in the story may frustrate some, but for those who become involved in the book it should inspire a nervous feeling that something twenty pages ago was important (an admirable trait in a mystery). The literary, political, and scientific giants become entangled in trivial ways that one would dismiss were it not for Mr. Collins' apparent research (I dare someone to impeach his facts). At times the trivia threatens to overwhelm the search, but they are the immediate results of inquiries that do eventually lead to the physical remains of Tom Paine.

Even when the hunt (and the book) ends at the most logical starting point that one could possibly think of, the long road he took to get there doesn't seem wasted. How else would he, and by extension I, have learned about the history of British hedges, octagonal houses, or earth closets? Through it all he conveys his awe at what is forgotten, what is remembered, and the fact that some of it is documented. This book is no document, but it made me want to wade through old records like deer through tall grass. I am unfortunately too lazy and careless to be allowed to do so. Instead I await Mr. Collins' next book.
... Read more