Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“The story begins with a voice on the radio.” Dan Callahan, Bing and Billie and Frank and Ella and Judy and Barbra.

“Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once.” Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.

“On the edge of a typical Minneapolis coal yard in the 1930s was a wooden shack known as a doghouse.” David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

“When the Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel.” Richard Stark (Donald Westlake), Dirty Money: A Parker Novel.

“Between Europe and the great, mature civilization of China and India lies a belt of over three thousand miles, dominated by desert and stony tableland, where rainfall is relatively little, frontiers are contested, political unity has rarely existed, and where as the late Princeton historian Bernard Lewis claimed, there has been no historical pattern of authority.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.

“According to legend, the first unethical science experiment in history was designed by none other than Cleopatra.” Sam Kean, The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science.

“The old man with the droopy right eye sat slumped on the witness chair pretending to be a nobody.” Matt Birkbeck, Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino.

“In the Spring of 1889, when an event whose only comparisons were biblical descriptions of the awful Last Day of Judgment came rushing into Johnstown, few people in the valley knew for certain who belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the private retreat up the mountain, with its marvelous, sparkling artificial lake.” Al Roker, Ruthless Tide: The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster.

“I was quite young the first time I saw the river; it was probably in 1928.” Frank Dale, Delaware Diary: Episodes in the Life of a River.

“The first measurement, like the first word or first melody, is lost to time: impossible to localise and difficult to even imagine.” James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.

“The only impartial witness was the sun.” David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

“Reporting, like detective work, is a process of elimination.” David Grann, The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.

“Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, is known for his resolute personal integrity.” Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“They watched as a dead man was brought to the hospital: a fractured skull, blood everywhere, ligaments ripped loose from their mooring—medics had hauled him there ‘in three buckets,’ a bystander remarked.” Reid Mitenbuler, Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.

“There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew’s house was the first place they went.” James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

“Everyone in Lamperdown knew that Mr. Behrens, who lived with his aunt at the Old Rectory and kept bees, and Mr. Calder, who lived in a cottage on the hilltop outside the village and was the owner of a deerhound called Rasselas, were the closest of close friends.” Michael Gilbert, Game Without Rules.

“In August 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered, the soldiers, sailors, and airmen scheduled to participate in the invasion of Japan reacted as you might expect.” Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

“When people ask me what I do—taxi drivers, dental hygienists—I tell them I work in an office.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

“Approaching the museum, ready to hunt, Stéphane Breitwieser clasps hands with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklau, and together they stroll to the front desk and say hello, a cute couple.” Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession.

“Killing someone is easy.” Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club.

“For more than a decade, defenders of democracy have been issuing a stark warning: The world is in the midst of a ‘democratic recession,’ with sign of a turnaround on the horizon.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the ‘New & Noteworthy’ (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he’d been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair.” Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot.

“In January 1829, Abram Garfield emerged from a shack in Orange, Ohio, swiveled west, and started toward what passed for civilization on this frontier.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.