Thomas Paine by Craig Nelson is a biography of Thomas Paine. I had picked this up many years ago wandering the discount section of a book store. It seemed appropriate to read it after reading Common Sense. This book received the 2007 Henry Adams prize.
Started: 7/4/2011
Completed: 9/2/2012
Recommendation: You have to really be interested in Paine. There is a huge amount of interesting information, but it is very dry.
Recommended By: Nobody.
Words I looked Up:
jeremiad -- a long, mournful complain or lamentation; list of woes
parlous -- full of danger or risk
Review:
Thomas Paine remains a larger than life figure. Common Sense was central to both the American and the French revolutions. As an American, I had no idea that Thomas Paine had actually been involved in the French revolution and that he had been imprisoned (all but guillotined) in the process. I have ready other books that mentioned what happened to his body after death, so I had a sense of how he was oddly revered. I had a sense, as well, that he was polarizing figure, but no idea that he managed to alienate virtually all his friends given enough time. I actually read Common Sense last summer, so I had an introduction to both how vindictive his writing could be and how funny it was. Knowing more about the man and his life helps me to understand how he came to write such an important book and how it took over his life. The detail in this book is pretty amazing when one considers how much time has passed, but the author seems to have been careful when identifying his sources and offers, on several occasions, conflicting views of similar situations. This comfort with seeing both the good and bad in events and in the man rings true to me. I think that some of the historical documents reflect seeing the same event in different ways and, frankly, I think it is fair to expect individuals to have some bias. It was a good, if slow, read and I'm glad to have read it.
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