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Middleton’s gift shop had this outdoor display featuring our book! Thanks guys!

How Southern Gothic can you get? The road to Middleton Place Plantation, just outside Charleston, South Carolina, is lined with live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. When you turn your car into the drive of the plantation, you behold a landscape the way it looked around the birth of the United States.

In recent months, my co-author Denise Kiernan and I have been driving up and down the east coast visiting historic sites associated with the signers of America’s founding documents. It’s our way of promoting our existing Quirk book, Signing Their Lives Away, about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, and Signing Their Rights Away, about the Constitution signers, which pubs Sept 6.

When we have some free time, we’ve been working on a documentary about these sites. So far, in the state of South Carolina, we’ve created a short film about Middleton Place, Hopsewee Plantation, and the Governor’s House Inn in downtown Charleston. All three of these homes were residences of signers of the Declaration of Independence.

We think the videos have turned out pretty well, and we’re anxious to move on to other states.

Joseph D'Agnese, co-author of the Indiana Jones Handbook, 24: The Official CTU Operations Manual, Signing Their Lives Away and the upcoming Signing Their Rights Away (due out in September), recently decided to try an experiment in self-publishing, releasing a collection of his best non-fiction science journalism in an eBook.

Entitled The Scientist and the Sociopath, this best-of collection features a number of pieces featured previously in places like Discover, Wired and Seed. From profiling the guy who conceived the Big Bang Theory (but watched someone else get the Nobel Prize for it) to hanging out with scientists investigating flying snakes, there's plenty of true, undeniably quirky stories here

You can download a copy for the ridiculous price of 99 cents for the Kindle and Nook. Get it.