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A review by bookwormmichelle
Signing Their Lives Away by Joseph D'Agnese, Denise Kiernan
3.0
Hmm. I WANTED to like this. Parts of it were well done and it's always good, IMO, to remind Americans today what people went through to establish our liberties.
However, this particular volume has some weaknesses.
1. Errors. One egregious example is an assertion that the French killed their king, Louis XVI, "two years" after 1785. Umm, we'd need to make that EIGHT years.
2. Controversial opinions cited as fact, not footnoted at all, so readers cannot read the original works and decide among different explanations and hypotheses.
3. Too cutesy, overblown attempts to be "hip" ("The Signer Who Is Two Degrees from Kevin Bacon" ???) Yeah, the Founding Fathers were really worried about that. Huh? Every possible connection made with a pop culture figure like an actor is jumped on; it's funny, but a lot of OTHER eminent people descended from signers were not mentioned.
So, this is a fun beginning. Cleaned up and footnoted, it could be a real gem.
However, this particular volume has some weaknesses.
1. Errors. One egregious example is an assertion that the French killed their king, Louis XVI, "two years" after 1785. Umm, we'd need to make that EIGHT years.
2. Controversial opinions cited as fact, not footnoted at all, so readers cannot read the original works and decide among different explanations and hypotheses.
3. Too cutesy, overblown attempts to be "hip" ("The Signer Who Is Two Degrees from Kevin Bacon" ???) Yeah, the Founding Fathers were really worried about that. Huh? Every possible connection made with a pop culture figure like an actor is jumped on; it's funny, but a lot of OTHER eminent people descended from signers were not mentioned.
So, this is a fun beginning. Cleaned up and footnoted, it could be a real gem.