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Signing Their Lives Away

the Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of the Edmonton Public Library.
Dec 02, 2016miaone rated this title 1.5 out of 5 stars
The only purpose I can find for this book so far is to put me to sleep at bedtime. I'm not sure what the authors thought they were writing, but I wouldn't file it under either history or biography. The tone is often flip and slangy, and sometimes even crude (use of the following: hell, damn, butt, asses. None of those words enhances the writing; rather, the opposite is true.) The layout makes it hard to read. For example, the book is shorter in height than most books, and each signer's signature is printed huge and perpendicular to the writing in his chapter. There is no purpose to superimposing the signature over part of the page, as the first thing that you see for each man is his signature. A further annoyance of the sideways signatures is that they hide the page numbers; for the first hundred or so pages I didn't think there WERE any page numbers because I couldn't see any. I think the idea was to have the book look different and appealing, so that maybe we wouldn't notice that there is so little substance to the biographies. The book could have been a useful and informative tool for learning about the Declaration's signers. As it is, it merely adds to the current trend to make history simple and shallow.