The Chris Moeller Archives

Aaron's Book Nook - by Aaron Moeller

Welcome to a new two-part Chris Moeller Archives feature in which I first share a review of a book I’ve recently read. Today’s review is sponsored by the Cedar Rapids Public Library, a hidden treasure and fountain of knowledge in the heart of downtown CR. I couldn’t find any signs confirming the fact, but they’ve slashed prices in a way that clearly suggests a going-out-of-business sale. So get there while there's still time....

Today’s book is from an author who lives just down the road from me in Iowa City. A McSweeney’s editor and Village Voice contributor, Paul Collins has written a fascinating new title called The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine. I expected it to be a new biography of a man considered perhaps America’s most infamous Founding Father, but it’s much more than that. In fact, the man’s death serves merely as the book’s jumping off point.

Paine, of course, was the author of Common Sense, the massively popular pamphlet, published anonymously, that served as a call to action to pre-Revolution American colonists. As Collins points out, at that time, many of the country’s 2.5 million people couldn’t read, so readership of the pamphlet was practically universal among the literate. It is likely that only the Bible was more widely read in this hemisphere during that tumultuous time. "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense," John Adams is quoted as saying, "the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain."

Another book written by Paine, however, would turn him into a notorious figure. The Age of Reason scandalized the young nation with its dismissal of religion and established social mores. "Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man," Paine wrote, who upon his death was considered treasonous and unpatriotic. Children burned him in effigy. Raised a Quaker but denied a Quaker burial, this is where Collins’ story takes off and leaves behind biographical convention. Ten years after Paine’s death, an admirer named Will Cobbett dug up the firebrand’s bones from their unmarked grave and hauled them to Europe where he planned to place them in a mausoleum, hoping to inspire other like-minded secularists and revolutionaries.

Here Collins begins to weave his story through the 19th century, tracking both Paine’s scattered remains and the diverging effects and influence of his ideas. Surely, no comprehensive history of grave robbing would be complete without including the strange, epic tale of Paine’s afterlife. The story picks up steam as other legendary figures (in addition to Paine’s more obvious fellow Founding Fathers) begin making appearances – John Stuart Mill, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, even fiction writers like Poe and Melville. Most intriguing was a large chapter devoted to phrenology, a now largely forgotten science that was once wildly popular and almost universally accepted. Phrenology was the idea that intelligence and personality traits could be observed and predicted by studying the shape of someone’s skull. As archaic as this sounds today, most of the western world’s intelligentsia, including those listed above, were believers.

Most striking of all in Collins’ approach is the fact that he, too, is a character in the story. The narrative of the book follows Collins’ own travels to the former sites and locations inhabited by the book’s (mostly) long-dead characters. It’s an effective approach that brings the story (and Paine) into the present, not the least of which is the report of Paine’s remains turning up as recently as 1976, with the country in the throes of bicentennial fever. Collins does a masterful job delivering a brilliant, troubled, eccentric, dangerous man into a modern context. We should be so lucky there’s still a place for such a dynamic, free-thinking figure in today’s political and cultural landscape.

Also, I liked that this book was in hardcover. In the week that it rested at my bedside and atop my living room coffee table, it doubled as a coaster.

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For the second part of the feature, I’m going to post a review of a book that I have not read. Today’s book is Does She or Doesn’t She? by Alisa Kwitney.

Does She or Doesn’t She? is a book that asks a very mysterious question in its title, a question which almost (but not quite) makes me want to read it. It’s a book with an illustration of a woman on the cover who is wearing shoes that I suspect few women would call ‘sensible’. She’s literally kicking up her heels and has her purse thrown casually over her shoulder. I can deduce the following – she is a sassy, urban, sophisticated woman who is definitely going places! Also, the book cover is pink.

The first line of the book is "I’m going to take my hand off your mouth if you promise not to scream". This is not a bad first line. A real grabber, actually. But I didn’t get to read anymore of it than that. As I was looking at this book at the bookstore, I saw someone coming toward me and felt a strange need to put it down quickly and pretend I was looking at something else.

The rest of my review then is culled from the book’s entry at amazon.com. Apparently, it’s a pretty good book, even though PadreRat from San Diego doesn’t think it’s as "crafty" as Kwitney’s last book The Dominant Blonde. PadreRat also thinks that, reading the book, you will be "thrown for a loop as well" and that "much of the story comes at you from behind a corner". Sounds like my kind of book!

An anonymous reader who’s too ashamed to even say where she’s from (so probably Houston) likes that the "daughter is a hoot, the plumber is yummy, and the husband, well, he has problems".

Bearette24 from New York thinks that even though Kwitney has "created a likable, smart and quirky protagonist", you might have to "keep your expectations low on the plausibility front". She didn’t like the ending either. Jeanette C. from Utah also thinks the ending was "silly". I think I have to agree more with them and give the book a thumbs-down. Though keep in mind, I’ve not read it.

So in conclusion, I probably won’t be reading this book. Even though it asks a question which nearly intrigues me, and there may possibly be some notoriety attached to being the first male to ever read it, I think I’m going to sit this one out.

Also, the book is in paperback. Even though it’s lightweight and easy to carry, it doesn’t seem to have any utilitarian purpose that I can see. Except for reading it, of course. Almost forgot about that one.

posted by Anonymous @ 7:48 PM