HIS COUNTRY WAS THE WORLD

This biography of Tom Paine should do well as supplementary reading for Junior High and High School history. Though it lacks the power and incisiveness of Fast's Citizen Paine, it might well- with older boys and girls- provide a stepping stone to that book, as it achieves values of its own in a certain quality of even, direct story-telling. Beginning with Paine at seventeen, when he ran away from home, the book then traces the familiar facts of his two brief marriages, his abortive career as a corset maker, and his drifting until he found his place as pamphleteer and statesman. As one reads this well-documented biography, one is increasingly amazed that a man of such brilliance and integrity could have been so slandered, and so praised, and then forgotten so long. An excellent piece of basic reading in democracy.