<DIV>Christopher Hitchens, the #1 <I>New York Times</I> best-selling author of <I>God Is Not Great</I> has been called a Tom Paine for our times, and in this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, he vividly introduces Paine and his <I>Declaration of the Rights of Man</I>, the world&#8217;s foremost defense of democracy. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke&#8217;s attack on the French Revolution, Paine&#8217;s text is a passionate defense of man&#8217;s inalienable rights, and the key to his reputation. Ever since the day of publication in 1791, <I>Declaration of the Rights of Man</I> has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but in <I>Thomas Paine&#8217;s Rights of Man</I>, Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Famous as a polemicist and provocative commentator, Hitchens is a political descendent of the great pamphleteer. In this engaging work he demonstrates how Thomas Paine&#8217;s book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America, and how &#8220;in a time when both rights and reason are under attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.&#8221;</DIV>