The Trouble with Tom, Paul Collins
The Trouble with Tom, Paul Collins
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
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The Trouble with Tom
The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

Author: Paul Collins

Narrator: Tim Getman

Unabridged: 9 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/31/2022


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 Paul Collins

Paul Collins is an author specializing in science writing, magazine writing, history, and memoir; his books have appeared in a dozen languages. He is the recipient of an Oregon Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and teaches in the Creative Writing program at Portland State University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Rory on February 12, 2007

Once again Paul Collins proves himself to be one of the most important historians of our time. The Trouble with Tom is the most important piece of early American history that Americans will never know about. Collins explores not only the misadventures surrounding Paine's missing bones, but more impo......more

Goodreads review by Denise on September 14, 2017

I picked up the book originally researching Thomas Paine's reasons behind his notable quote rejecting the reasonableness of tolerance. What I found was a lot more of a fascinating story, a man reviled by so many (even the Quakers) and yet remembered fondly for his radical rationalism.......more

Goodreads review by Michiel on September 02, 2017

What a pleasant journey this book was! Detective novel, travel journey, history book and diary.......more

Goodreads review by R.E. on February 16, 2023

The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins 1/16/2023 Paper I probably knew less about Thomas Paine than any of the school-remembered names of the players in our nation’s struggle for independence. I picked up this book, assuming it was a biography of that man. While biographical information was presen......more


Quotes

“Highly readable and filled with enough witty anecdotes to entertain people who don’t normally read history, this book is a reminder that history surrounds and influences us every day of our lives.” School Library Journal

“In this quixotic, mischievous, and often hilarious work, Collins traces the bizarre story of Thomas Paine’s remains…[and] offers an entertaining and compelling investigation of his legacy…This book reads like a wry, witty novel and offers a delicious twist at the end.” Publishers Weekly