Citizen Tom Paine

I rated this at the top of my list for best fiction read in 2017.

It's billed as a novel, but I wonder if today it might be classified as creative nonfiction. My impression is that it closely follows historical accounts both in the 18th-century revolutionary settings and in the biography of Thomas Paine, and that the author used fictional imagination and techniques to render his character and impart drama and immediacy without disturbing the known record.

Wherever the actual line is between fact and invention, I found this an exciting, inspiring, and poignant depiction of time and place and of the one man, if there was any one man, who lit the fuse of American independence.

The complete story of the life of Thomas Paine. Yes that Tom Paine, the author of the pamphlet titles 'Common Sense'. The work that move the American Revolution forward. Howard Fast tells the story with a vivid picture as if we were right in the room with Mr. Paine. You can feel the hurt in his fingers , smell the filth of the squalor he lived much of his life. If you read Howard Fast's details you will have a very different perspective on the trials and tribulations of our fore fathers and leaders. Folks were rotten to the core. Many of our American citizens were mean, selfish, and as corrupt as the day is long. Somehow through his 72 years, Thomas Paine went to his grave writing and standing on one principle, the rights of the common show more man. He literally fought and gave his entire life for these rights. Maybe we need more Paine in our lives today! Thomas Paine that is! show less

Kudos to Howard Fast. If you want to know about Tom Paine and his part in the American Revolution (and Thomas Jefferson's 'Declaration of Independence') you gotta read this book. What a great read! Paine had problems (who doesn't??) but he was able to activate the run-of-the-mill American Colonist to fight for his rights to self-representation and freedom of religion like few others before (or since). If you can get 'Common Sense,' and 'The Rights of Man,' to read in conjunction with this 'fictional' biography, you will be very much enlightened regarding the American Revolution and its development from 1776 until today.

Good book about the man who wrote "Common Sense," and was one of the key people in sparking, and sustaining to completion, the American Revolution. It's an interesting, well-written fictionalized account of the real events of Paine's life, which shows his brilliance and flaws. Rather heartbreaking in parts. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in this historical period.

A dramatic and enlightening account of the most radical of radicals of America's founders. His liberatarian ideas are dutifully ignored by modern conservatives.