Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese. Signing Their Lives Away. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009. Print.

Signing Their Lives Away is subtitled The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence. It contains brief biographies of each of the fifty-six signers arranged by state north to south. It tells its stories with a certain amount of history and lots of trivia.

It is clear that one of the authors’ motivations is to set the record straight. Other similar accounts, they claim, either said things that were mistake or unproven. If anything, Signing Their Lives Away goes in the opposite direction by denying things that were recorded by reliable sources.

So some have said that New Hampshire’s Josiah Bartlett had his home burned by the British during the war. Actually, it was burned by a Tory mob in1774. Although the authors at times seem almost pro-British, we do note that yes, there were sometimes Tory mobs in the colonies, too.

The authors suggest that Ben Franklin really never conducted his kite experiment. It was simply an untested hypothesis he got credit for. It makes this writer wonder why Franklin invented the lightning rod, then, on an untested hypothesis.

They even question whether Delaware’s Caesar Rodney made his overnight ride to Philadelphia to cast the vote which approved the Declaration. As proof to the authors that this event did occur, I will use the Miracle on 34th Street argument. The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp commemorating the event. Would the Postal Service celebrate something that did not happen?

Two signers, though, really did have a rough time of it during the war. Both were from New Jersey, where the king’s troops were stationed for many years. Abraham Clark had at least two sons captured by the British with at least one dying on a prison hulk. John Hart was on the run, even spending time in caves, when British soldiers were in his neck of the woods.

We also learn that Francis Hopkinson of New Jersey designed the American flag. Betsy Ross, wife of signer George Ross’s nephew, may have sewn a flag and likely does get credit for cutting the five-pointed stars. Hopkinson’s stars had six points.

I always wondered about Richard Stockton, who has a New Jersey Turnpike rest area named after him. Since a couple other Jersey rest areas are named after writers (viz., Walt Whitman and Joyce Kilmer) for a long time I thought that rest area was named after the author of “The Lady or the Tiger” until they put up a plaque explaining who their Richard Stockton was.

We are reminded that the Declaration of Independence, while largely written by Thomas Jefferson, was officially drafted by a committee which included Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and John Adams. Signing Their Lives Away tells us that Franklin actually suggested the adjective self-evident to describe the truths of natural law named in the Declaration. That makes sense from what he said about the Bible in his Autobiography—that, in so many words, many of the Bible’s truths are self-evident also.

The library where I found Signing Their Lives Away files it with Young Adult books. That is appropriate for the reading level. It would be accessible for short reports on many of the Founders. Most of the entries are three to five page sketches.

The book contains some curiosities. It has a list of the men who presided over the United States in Congress under the Articles of Confederation. These ten men technically were presidents of the United States before George Washington. It has a quotation from King George III in reaction to the Declaration.

It also notes that six men signed both the Declaration and the Constitution; three signed those two documents plus the Articles of Confederation; and Roger Sherman of Connecticut signed those three plus the Articles of Association, which established the Continental Congress in 1774. The book calls him the Über-Signer.

There are a few minor questions or quibbles. At one point Signing Their Lives Away speaks of “some British soldiers who fired into an angy mob, killing five colonists.” (26, 27) For some reason—political correctness? pro-Tory sympathies?—it does not name this incident by what history books usually call it: the Boston Massacre. It is also not clear that the authors were aware that the British Empire did not change from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar until 1752. A few times when Signing Their Lives Away notes that a date of an event is uncertain, it may because it occurred before 1752 and different accounts use different calendars.

Signing Their Lives Away is a light read, but it does help us appreciate our founders in spite of personal shortcomings that the book seems all too happy to point out. Back in 1965 Bob Dylan sang, “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” Signing Their Lives Away demonstrates that his lament still applies.