Review: e-Book Common Sense by Thomas Paine

I bought this to help my sister with a paper she had to write.



About the Book

Thomas Paine arrived in America from England in 1774. A friend of Ben Franklin, he was a writer of poetry and tracts condemning the slave trade. In 1775, as hostilities between Britain and the colonies intensified, Paine wrote Common Sense to encourage the colonies to break the British exploitative hold through independence. The little booklet of 50 pages was published January 10, 1776 and sold a half-million copies, approximately equal to 75 million copies today.

My Review

I can't say that I liked this one, but I didn't hate it and I actually found it fairly interesting. It was intriguing and as Paine made his arguments for why we should revolt I kept having to remind myself of the time that this was written. It really made me think had we not had people like Paine in our history where would we be today? How different of a world would we live in if there had not been revolutionists?

The language took me a bit to get used to. I realized how nice the dictionary feature on the nook really is... There were quite a few times that I had to look something up because I was lost as to what Paine was trying to get across.

Overall I think it was a compelling piece of literature. At the very least it was thought provoking and gave me a better idea of the place America was in politically and socially before the revolution.