"[A] quixotic, mischievous and often hilarious work...Part travelogue, part memoir and part historical mystery, this book reads like a wry, witty novel and offers a delicious twist at the end."--Publishers WeeklyPaul Collins takes us on a strange odyssey down the forgotten roads of history as he hunts for the bones of Tom Paine--exhumed and then lost, and now scattered around the globe. Crossing the paths of everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and feral monkeys, this colorful search for a founding father's body simultaneously excavates the very soul of democracy. Paul Collinsis an assistant professor of English at Portland State University and the author ofSixpence House,The Trouble with Tom,Not Even Wrong, andBanvard's Folly. His work has appeared inSmithsonian, theNew York Times, andSlate. He edits the Collins Library imprint of McSweeney's Books and appears regularly on NPR'sWeekend Editionas the show's resident literary detective. A Book Sense/History Channel Top Ten Pick A typical book about an American founding father doesn't start at a gay piano bar and almost end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine wasn't your typical founding father. The firebrandCommon Senserebel of 1776, a radical on the run from the law in London, and a senator of the First French Republic, Paine was a walking, talking revolution. When he died, shunned as an infidel by every church, Paine had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, a convert to Paine's cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain, where he planned to build a mausoleum in Paine's honor. But he never got around to it--and Paine's bones were lost. Paul Collins combines wry present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the scattered remains of Tom Paine and finds them hidden, among other places, in a Paris hotel, underneath a London tailor's stool, and inside a roadside statue in New York. Crossing paths with everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and feral monkeys, this colorful search for a founding father's body excavates the soul of democracy itself. "This is research as the Great Library God intended--one part resourcefulness; one part curiosity; one part instinct; one part slow, keen observation of detail."--Los Angeles Times "An entertaining romp."--The New Yorker "Despite the popularity of his revolutionary essayCommon Sense, Paine was scorned as a rebel constantly searching for a cause. When he died in 1809, no church would bury him in its cemetery, leaving his remains to be interred on his own farm. A few years later, William Cobbett, an Englishman and revolutionary in his own right, dug up the body with plans to bury it beneath a monument to be built in London. That never happened. Over the next century, those who were most influenced by his writings sought to give him a proper burial, but ultimately his remains were lost. Some names, like Thomas Edison, will be familiar. Others, like Dr. Foote, a self-help author, will not be, but provide interesting color. Paines spirit eventually influenced a number of movements, touching on everything from feminism to the Thirteen Club (its sole function--mocking every superstition imaginable). The author does a great job of tying disparate threads together and leading them back to Paine. He intersperses the history with travel narratives detailing his own search for the remains. These sections not only showcase the unusual turns research can take, but also bring a unique