The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine - Hardcover

Collins, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582345023 ISBN 13: 9781582345024

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2005

Synopsis

Paul Collins travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of our most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine.

A typical book about an American founding father doesn't start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine isn't your typical founding father. A firebrand rebel and a radical on the run, Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. In death, his story turns truly bizarre. Shunned as an infidel by every church, he had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, a former enemy converting to Paine's cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain, where he planned to build a mausoleum in Paine's honor. But he never got around to it. So what happened to the body of this founding father?

Well, it got lost. Paine's missing bones, like saint's relics, have been scattered for two centuries, and their travels are the trail of radical democracy itself. Paul Collins combines wry, present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the remains of Tom Paine and finds them hidden in, among other places, a Paris hotel, underneath a London tailor's stool, and inside a roadside statue in New York. Along the way he crosses paths with everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and hellfire ministers―not to mention a suicidal gunman, a Ferrari dealer, and berserk feral monkeys.

In the end, Collins's search for Paine's body instead finds the soul of democracy―for it is the story of how Paine's struggles have lived on through his eccentric and idealistic followers.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Collins is the author of Sixpence House and Not Even Wrong: A Father's Journey into the Lost History of Autism. He edits the Collins Library for McSweeney's Books, and his work has appeared in New Scientist, the Village Voice, and Business 2.0.

From School Library Journal:

Adult/High School–Despite the popularity of his revolutionary essay Common Sense, Paine was scorned as a rebel constantly searching for a cause. When he died in 1809, no church would bury him in its cemetery, leaving his remains to be interred on his own farm. A few years later, William Cobbett, an Englishman and revolutionary in his own right, dug up the body with plans to bury it beneath a monument to be built in London. That never happened. Over the next century, those who were most influenced by his writings sought to give him a proper burial, but ultimately his remains were lost. Some names, like Thomas Edison, will be familiar. Others, like Dr. Foote, a self-help author, will not be, but provide interesting color. Paines spirit eventually influenced a number of movements, touching on everything from feminism to the Thirteen Club (its sole function–mocking every superstition imaginable). The author does a great job of tying disparate threads together and leading them back to Paine. He intersperses the history with travel narratives detailing his own search for the remains. These sections not only showcase the unusual turns research can take, but also bring a unique sense of pacing to a history book. Highly readable and filled with enough witty anecdotes to entertain people who dont normally read history, this book is a reminder that history surrounds and influences us every day of our lives.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1582345023
• ISBN 13: 9781582345024
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256