Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Paul Collins knows how to have fun with old books and he passes that madcap glee onto you, the reader. Consider his advice for securing privacy on mass transit,"It is a fact that if you want to be left alone on the subway, all you need to do is read a really beat-up old book.... You think I am joking--- but try it sometime.
I root through my backpack and pull out of my bag the shabbiest, oldest-looking book imaginable. Its covers were once a pleasant marbled green, but now worn down to a barklike wooden color; every single page inside is water-stained brown. It appears to have been left at the bottom of a pond, then dragged behind a cart, and finally thrown off a high cliff."
It's not often that you come upon a tome whose subject, history of political philosophy, has you laughing out loud at least once every couple of chapters. It's history, writ with wit, very enjoyable.

I won't admit just how far I was into this book before I realized the title's a play on Hitchcock's movie "The Trouble With Harry." But it's a fitting tribute: like a Hitchcock movie, it's a twisting tale filled with rogues, oddballs, humor and even a McGuffin in the form of Tom Paine's body, which gets scattered in every direction possible.

Paine himself only appears briefly though memorably before shuffling off his mortal coil. It's not a biography of Paine, which is fine because there's plenty of those already. It's something more unusual: a meditation on how one man's ideas carry on in unexpected ways long after he is gone. Collins has a whole cast of colorful and forgotten 19th century firebrands who were so inspired by Paine's work that some even had to possess a relic of their favorite rebel. There's also delightful cameos by greats like Darwin, Twain, and Whitman.

Virtually all the history and anecdotes in this book were new to me. It's as if the author was determined to write something that didn't cover any of the same ground as anyone else, and the result is both ambitious and playful.

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 earlier generations as their chaotic, multi-sided struggle 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 necessary.

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: Truth and Deception in Renaissance Europe by Anne Wroe, Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden by David Kent and Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes by Bertram Fields.

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.

Having tweaked the nose of the church in his lifetime, Thomas Paine was corpse non grata at the cemetery gates when he died. So his remains floated around for a hundred years, passing through the hands of a motley assortment of radicals, freethinkers, and nutcases. Collins' delicious wit brings this bizarre tale vividly to life. It's not your usual sort of history, and that's what makes it so enjoyable. Highly recommended.

To those reviewers who were disappointed because "this book was supposed to be about Thomas Paine," I would have to say that you missed the point.

This book is much more than just another bio of Thomas Paine. It's about his ideals, and the author brilliantly uses his bones to tell the story. He does a great job of weaving the story and connecting many of the brilliant minds who continued to fight for the principles espoused by Paine, and they did so long after he had already been villified by most Americans and British.

I loved this book, and I enjoyed reading about many of the people, such as Conway, who we rarely learn about.

If you want to read a biography of Thomas Paine, there are several available. If you want to read a book which makes you appreciate those people who have stood up for the ideals found in The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, then read this book. But don't forget to read the writings of Paine himself.

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.

This book is just great fun. It rambles and stumbles deliciously from one topic to another, including some esoterica, and at times loses focus on Paine. Does not have to be read straight through. (I skipped ahead to find out what happened to Paine's bones.) Refreshingly free of political bias and spin. Pedants, specialists, and political wingnuts on the left probably won't care for it. Wingnuts on the right will likely be indifferent.

This is just superb, a completely entertaining book with some depth behind it. My wife loved it, and occasionally read me passages as she read it. I loved it, and kept mentioning passages to her as I read it.

Paul Collins is a wonderful writer. I thought John McPhee might be the best writer of nonfiction I've ever read, but Paul Collins is a worthy rival... with quite a different voice and approach. The book seems to be impeccably researched. But it's not really a history, it's a sort of travel volume or collection of anecdotes, in which Collins tells about his quest to determine what became of Tom Paine's body after Paine's death. The book shifts back and forth between his own experiences, and the various characters (in all senses of the word) who were touched by the travels of Tom Paine's remains. Paul Collins is himself a character in his own book, and frequently breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to the reader. He has opinions and lets them show, but I think he does a careful and honest job of separating the facts from his reflections upon those facts (more so than, say, Tom Wolfe).

It has interesting flashes of illumination into the life of the 1800s, as Collins tries to get into the heads of the people he is writing about.

One of the most interesting parts to me was his comments on the role of phrenology in the 1800s. It is today regarded as such a quaint curiosity that I never fully realized the extent of its acceptance, and its connection with progressive thinking and social reform. It was, if you like, the psychoanalysis of its day. He points out something I'd half-noticed: the degree to which novelists of the period make a point of describing the shape of their characters' heads.

My high school is not far from New Rochelle and the next time I go to a reunion I am definitely going to make some time to visit the Tom Paine memorial.

Moncure Conway might have been the most fascinating character 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!