Summary
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. The firebrand Common Sense rebel of 1776, a radical on the run from execution in London, and a senator of revolutionary France, 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. 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 honour. 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 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 Dickens to se reformers and hellfire ministers - not to mention a suicidal gunman, a Ferrari dealer, and berserk feral monkeys.
In the end, Collin'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.
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.
