Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month Review:

It would not be an exaggeration to say that without Thomas Paine there may not have been an American Revolution. At the very least, it may well have been of a substantially different nature and character, and our government may be far more plutocratic than it was designed to be.

Yet Paine is often absent from broad-brush overviews of the American Revolution, or simply relegated to the title of "pamphleteer."

Part of the reason for this is that he wrote "The Age Of Reason," which was a finely-tuned attack on organized religion. After "Common Sense" and "The Rights of Man," two books that were massive best-sellers, "Reason" caused many Americans - then in the midst of a religious revival - to turn against Paine. Thus he died in relative obscurity in New York City, and today even the whereabouts of his body is unknown (an interesting story that Harvey J. Kaye tells well).

His critics notwithstanding, Thomas Paine was in many ways the father of modern liberalism, and thus one of the most important of the founders of what both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson referred to as that "liberal" experiment, the United States of America.