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

A typical book about a major historical figure doesn't start at a gay piano bar and almost end in a drainage ditch. But then, Tom Paine wasn't a typical historical figure... 'A genre-bending spellbinder' Newsday 'Collins elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be "normal" and what it means to be human' LA Times The author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, a radical on the run from the law in London, a founding father of the United States of America, a senator of revolutionary France, Thomas Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. He was a walking revolution in human form - the most dangerous man alive. But in death Paine's story turns truly bizarre - his bones were taken from New York to London and eventually disappeared. In Paris, London and New York, in bars, grocers, shops and national libraries, crossing paths along the way with, among others, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Cobbett, Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin and even Lord Bryon, Paul Collins sets himself the challenge of finding out what happened to Paine's bones, and ends up telling one of the most extraordinary stories of modern history. A Book Sense Fall 2005 History Channel Top Ten Pick Paul Collins combines present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the physical remains of founding father Thomas Paine. Paine's missing body, like a saint's relics, has been scattered in pieces around the world over the last two centuries-a brainstem in New York, a box of bones in London, a lock of hair in Edinburgh, a skull in Sydney. As Paul tracks down these remnants, he revisits the unusual life of Tom Paine-and in his search for Paine's body, Collins uncovers that body's soul. "Savor this peculiar history of the way Thomas Paine's ideas—and his corpse—traveled after he died."-People 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 . Follows the trail of the corpse of the author of "Common Sense," who was shunned as an infidel by the church, buried in an open field on a New York farm, and whose body was later dug up and moved to Britain years later by a well-meaning admirer who nevergot around to burying the remains