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First Sentences

“At the turn of the twentieth century, before Zionist colonization had much appreciable effect on Palestine, new ideas were spreading, modern education and literacy had begun to expand, and the integration of the country’s economy into the global capitalist order was proceeding apace.” Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.

“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” Percival Everett, James.

“An ocean mapper once told me about a sponge that had shaken up his perspective on surveying the seafloor—not some ordinary dish sponge, but a fantastic deep-sea sponge that is among the oldest life-forms on Earth.” Laura Trethewey, The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans.

“Nicole often wondered what had happened to the body.” Vanessa Walters, The Nigerwife.

“Vince McMahon, like many of his wrestlers, didn’t grow up with the name he now uses.” Abraham Riesman, RingMaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.

“I have no hatred in me.” Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

“In the first five years that I lived in America, four of the five deadliest shootings in the nation’s history took place—at a school, a nightclub, a concert, a church.” Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns.

“So I’m writing again. Which is good news, I suppose, for those wanting a second book, but more unfortunate for the people that had to die so I could write it.” Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect.

“Chris Pearce grew up in the loud silence of his own mysterious origins.” Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune.

“Nigel Bathgate, in the language of his own gossip column, was ‘definitely intrigued’ about his week-end at Frantock.” Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead.

“Eugene Pacelli sat in a chair beside the simple brass bed, watching as the once robust pope, his face shrunken, labored to breathe beneath his oxygen mask.” David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“Simon Diggery and Ethel, his pet boa constrictor, were about fifty feet from Simon’s rust buck double-wide. Ethel looked comfy over a branch halfway up the tree.” Janet Evanovich, Hardcore Twenty-Four: A Stephanie Plum Novel.

“Heading out to dinner on a summer Saturday night, Byron and Emma Haines-Pescott (not their real names) couldn’t have expected much.” David Howard, Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World’s Most Charming Con Man.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“It’s a favorite pastime of Americans, and American conservatives especially, to keep watch for various evildoers scheming to seize the public sphere and rob of us our historic liberties.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Richard Cadogan raised his revolver, took careful aim and pulled the trigger.” Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop.

“Can you remember meeting William Shakespeare for the first time?” Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race.

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog name Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of fine spring afternoon.” James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss.

“Olmsted’s letter from Texas about the romance of nomadism was tailored to its recipient: Anne Charlotte Lynch, a New York poet, globe-trotting traveler, and eminent convener of literary salons.” Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.

“The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.” P.D. James, A Taste for Death.

“Rain drums Chicago’s gridded streets on the early morning of June 9, 1880.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

“The Dean, as he lay awake in bed that memorable Sunday night, pondered the astonishing vagaries of the weather.” Michael Gilbert, Close Quarters.

“On May 2, 1938, three special trains, carrying hundreds of German diplomats, government officials, Nazi Party leaders, security agents, and journalists, left Berlin accompanying the Führer on his first—and what would turn out to be his last—visit to Rome.” David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty.” Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor.

“It is hard to imagine working with books—writing an essay, a lecture, a report, a sermon—without the ability to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily: without, that is, the convenience of a good index.” Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.

“The most powerful man in Indiana stood next to the new governor at the Inaugural Ball, there to be thanked, applauded, and blessed for using the nation’s oldest domestic terror group to gain control of a uniquely American state.” Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan? Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.

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First Sentences

“In March 1939, as the world hurtled toward a catastrophic war, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gathered to elect a new supreme pontiff.” David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“All the Venables sat at Sunday dinner.” Edna Ferber, Cimarron.

“As the scientific world prepared to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1909, an amateur English geologist named Charles Dawson made a momentous find thirty miles from Darwin’s country home in southern England.” Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.

“They found the corpse on the eighth of July just after three o’clock in the afternoon.” Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (translated from the Swedish by Louis Roth), Roseanna.

“By September 1986, after four years as secretary of state, George Schultz had grown accustomed to presiding over official dinners for foreign dignitaries visiting Washington: the rigorous protocol, the solemn oratory, the contrived cordiality.” Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines.

“Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time.” Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel.

“The unlimited money unleashed into politics by the Citizens United decision in 2010 powered up the influence of the fossil fuel industry, which went to work hiding its political mischief behind an array of phony front groups and co-opted trade associations.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court.

“I drove to the Crossroads with the windows rolled down, the radio off, scanning the flat, packed earth in the glare of the afternoon light, the land broken up by clumps of creosote and rabbitbrush.” Ruchika Tomar, A Prayer for Travelers.

“I have done things the wrong way round all my life.” Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self.

“It was the coldest winter for forty-five years.” Ken Follett, Eye of the Needle.

“The Middle East, as we know it from today’s headlines, emerged from decisions made by the Allies during and after the First World War.” David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks.” Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

“The stories of Rondon do Pará had prepared me for a dodgy, crime-ridden place, but when I first visited the little Brazilian town on the eastern edge of the Amazon, it didn’t look particularly threatening to me.” Heriberto Araujo, Masters of the Lost Land: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier.