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First Sentences

“Charles Mitchell strode up the steps of 55 Wall Street, determined to project his usual sense of confidence and certitude.” Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How it Shattered a Nation.

“‘We hold these truth to be sacred. . .’ Sacred? No. That doesn’t sound right.” Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

“Few Americans understand just how great the Great Lakes really are.” John U. Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

“The fear that gripped the world in March 2020 is not something we will soon forget.” Steven Macedo & Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.

“A black man in a white hat stood sleeping against a brick wall.” Michael Rips, The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting.

“In the Roaring Twenties, the famous philanderers William Randolph Hearst and Babe Ruth might have thought it, but only Henry Ford said it out loud: Housewives of America should be patient with outbreaks of marital infidelity.” Gary M. Pomeranz, The Devil’s Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age.

“On the night the ships appeared, some fishermen were out on the ocean, working by torchlight.” Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.

“The first time it happened I was in a stall in a public bathroom just off Wall Street in Manhattan.” Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

“‘Have you ever thought what you are going to do when you get out of High School?’ asked an editorial in Rahway High’s Scarlet and Black.” Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

“There was a buzz of excitement when I arrived at my Harvard office at 78 Mt. Auburn Street on a June morning in 1972.” Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.

“Fred Rogers had given some very specific instructions to David Newell, who handled public relations for the PBS children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers.

“I like to probe the darkness at the edges of our nation’s history.” Nathaniel Philbrick, Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy.

“The glass doesn’t just break, it explodes into hundreds, thousands of pieces.” Andrew McCarthy, Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain.

“One of the great myths of our criminal system is that minor arrests and convictions are not especially terrible for the people who experience them.” Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment without Crime: How our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.

“The Indian Nation turnpike is a four-lane highway cutting north to south through the bottom right corner of Oklahoma.” Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.

Posted on by rjonakait

Some Books I Do Remember

I look over the books I read in 2025. Many I can’t seem to recall at all. Others I vaguely remember. But a few have stuck with me.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Twenty-four hours orbiting the earth. I did not like this slim, Booker prize winner as much as some friends did, but the poetic meditations made it worthwhile.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow. I was not familiar with this history of remarkable women who transformed department stores in mid-twentieth century New York City.

The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness. Any writing by Iceland’s Nobel Prize Winner is worth reading.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial (Translated from the French by John Lambert) by Emmanuel Carrère. A great book about the trial of terrorists who slaughtered many in Paris on Friday November 13, 2015.

32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line by Eric Ripert. This memoir from the renowned chef is surprisingly good but also disappointing. It ends too soon. I wanted to learn more about his later life, but if he has written about that, I have not found it.

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. This fictional biography of Bella de Costa Greene is not great literature, but Greene’s story—born Black, lived as a white, became J.P. Morgan’s librarian—is a great one.

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro. Learning how a great craftsman crafts is always fascinating.

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by Michael Luo. An important but often overlooked part of our history.

Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt. Picked by my history book group, I expected an academic slog, but Platt made this into a page turner.

My Friends, by Fredrik Backman. This, as is anything written by Backman, is worth reading.

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman. A delight for all ages.

The Maid by Nita Prose. A mystery story with a different, often amusing, main character.

Sonny Boy by Al Pacino. I resist most memoirs and especially those of show biz celebrities, but I saw several comments about how good this book is. I pulled it off a library shelf and loved it.

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I had seen the great movie Persepolis when it came out but only now read the graphic novels that inspired the film. They are also great.

The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I don’t remember many details even though I read the book recently, but Weiner gives us an important and depressing look at the country.

The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon. Taught me a lot about the commercial importance of the Great Lakes and the dangers of their waters as well as about the Edmund Fitzgerald. The book is another surprising page turner.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King. Learned many fascinating facts and insights about an important but now often overlooked person.

In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Steven Macedo & Frances Lee. A significant, critical examination of our responses to Covid. I am still coming to grips with this book and hope to write about it soon.

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Snippets

The sign was for a holiday event that I have never seen but would like to: “A drive-thru living Nativity.” Do you think there are camels???

A few years back I asked a political scientist what a democratic socialist was. She replied that they used to be called “liberal.” Today’s democratic socialists seem to want to remind Democrats of their roots with concerns for housing and food costs, wages, and childcare with the belief that such issues should not just be left to untrammeled free markets. But now such concerns that led to social security, public housing, Medicare, and Medicaid are considered so left wing as to be out of the mainstream.

For those looking for a holiday gift, a new calendar featuring Vladimir Putin in many poses has been released. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has not announced whether Trump has already obtained his embossed, autographed copy.

It was easy for me to spot the error. Maxwell King in The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers was debunking and ridiculing rumors about Mr. Rogers. Those silly rumors included that he was a convicted child molester and that he wore long sleeve shirts to hide tattoos. Another one was that he had been a sniper in Vietnam with many “kills” to his credit. The author reported that Rogers was never in the military and continued, “Fred Rogers was also much too old to have been drafted, given that the draft started in 1969, when his show was just getting established.” Of course, he could have been in the armed forces without being drafted, but what leapt out to me was the confident assertion that the draft started in 1969. I, along with many, many others, got a draft notice in 1968. The Selective Service Act of 1948 authorized conscription of young men, and many, including many I knew, were drafted into the army between 1948 and 1968. In 1969, the Act was changed to institute the draft lottery (you can look it up), but there was a draft long before that. But back to Mr. Rogers. I learned many fascinating things about him in the book, but I wondered, having spotted the error, whether I should doubt other things I had read in The Good Neighbor. I decided that I should not. The error was not about the life of Fred Rogers but about an extraneous fact. There was no reason to doubt the biographical research.

Fashion is dangerous. According to David Reynolds in Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him, Winston’s mother died at 67 while still lively. She “died suddenly from a haemorrhage. This followed a fall in the high heels to which she was addicted, which had caused a broken ankle, followed by gangrene and the amputation of her foot.”

I grew up a few blocks from the western shores of Lake Michigan, where I spent much time playing, walking a dog, and just gazing out, often seeing long, thin ships carrying ore on the horizon. Even so, I have read little about the Great Lakes partly because, unlike the oceans, rivers, and swamps, little has been written about them. These important bodies of water are largely ignored by most Americans. However, John U. Bacon’s The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald taught me a lot about the commercial importance of the Lakes and the dangers of their waters. Frightening waves are often steeper and come closer together on the Great Lakes than on the oceans. And, of course, there is a good deal to learn about the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank on November 10,1975, a sad and disturbing event that many of us only know about from the Gordon Lightfoot song. The book is a page turner. Highly recommended.