Volume 42, Number 10 · June 8, 1995
Disturbing the Peace
By Gordon S. Wood
Tom Paine: A Political Life
by John Keane
Little, Brown, 644 pp., $27.95
Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom
by Jack Fruchtman Jr.
Four Walls, Eight Windows, 557 pp., $30.00
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings
edited by Eric Foner
Library of America, 906 pp., $35.00
In 1805 cantankerous old John Adams pondered what to call the wild and tumultuous age he had lived through. Perhaps, he said, it might be called 'the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte...or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit.' Call it 'anything,' he said, but don't call it 'the Age of Reason.' It couldn't be the Age of Reason because it had been dominated by Thomas Paine. Adams doubted 'whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.' But this influence was far from a good thing. Indeed, said Adams,
Review, 5114 words
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