DISCOVERIES

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The Trouble

With Tom

The Strange Afterlife and Times

of Thomas Paine

Paul Collins

Bloomsbury: 256 pp., $24.95

THOMAS PAINE was “a walking revolution in human form,” writes Paul Collins fondly, “the firebrand ‘Common Sense’ rebel of 1776.” “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong,” begins that incendiary pamphlet on the utter uselessness of monarchy, “gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

As vital as “Common Sense” was to American history, Paine’s later work “The Age of Reason” earned him the label of atheist and compelled the Quakers (the church into which he was born) to deny his request to be buried among them. And so when he died, at age 72 in 1809, his body was buried at his farm in New Rochelle, N.Y. And here the story gets interesting.

Enter Collins, a man who traverses layers of history as easily as state lines and international borders. He has a way of dropping his reader -- mid-sentence, coffee cup raised to the lips -- into the very cafe, library corner, square of sidewalk or patch of dirt that existed 200 years ago.

Off he goes on the trail of Paine’s bones, which were dug up in New Rochelle in 1819 and transported to England by an admirer with a love-hate relationship to the rebel. Collins follows the bones as they change hands, one or two dropping here and there along the way, until, by the time the parcel is purchased at auction by a Quaker and brought to Philadelphia (Collins exhorts the reader to “pause for irony”), it is significantly lighter.

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. Collins treads lightly the paths of kismet, which bring him to phrenologists and bartenders and alcoholic monkeys and finally (after parts of the skeleton turn up in Paris and London) back to New Rochelle, where he finds Paine’s brain cemented into the head of a bust of the great man. (Pause for incredulity.) Paul Collins: Master of relics, idolater of bones, friend of all pamphlets and stray bits of paper. Nothing is really lost in this world!

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A Room With a Zoo

Jules Feiffer

Michael di Capua Books: 192 pp., $16.95

WHO can resist him? A cross between James Thurber and E.B. White with the wacky New Yorkishness of Saul Steinberg, Jules Feiffer became a household word in my own household after the publication of “Bark, George,” the story of a wobbly puppy who cannot speak in his native tongue because he has swallowed so many other animals -- which the doctor to whom his mother takes him pulls out, one by one and magically unharmed.

But we were latecomers. For other, more literate households it might have been “The Man in the Ceiling” or “Meanwhile” or “A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears.”

“A Room With a Zoo” features Julie, Feiffer’s 9-year-old daughter (adopted from Tennessee, she tells us) who needs a zoo “because I’m either going to be a vet when I grow up or a zookeeper.” Julie wants a dog, and badly, but her parents decide that she cannot have one until she is old enough to walk it: “ ‘Twelve,’ my father said. ‘Eleven,’ my mother said. ‘Eleven and a half,’ my father said. ‘Ten,’ I said. ‘Eleven,’ my father said. ‘Ten and a half,’ my mother said.’ ”

From this superior bargaining position, Julie wangles a cat named Timmy. But Timmy has a habit of eyeing Julie as if the young lady were a cat-killing criminal. So she gets Hammy the hamster, her “make-up pet.” Next arrives a fish named Oscar (whose eyes are black, “like a gangster’s”), to get Timmy’s mind off Hammy. (The whole family watches Oscar, as if his bowl were a TV set.)

Three other fish, all named Reddy, are followed by a turtle (Turtelini); Jessie, another kitty; Hermy the hermit crab; and, over spring break, the class bunny, Butch. Havoc is wreaked, things are broken, but Julie ends up earning her heart’s desire. “A Room With a Zoo,” along with Feiffer’s illustrations of flailing parents and wide-eyed animals, is nothing less than a testament to the helplessness of parents in the face of their love for their children.