Posted on by rjonakait

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

First Sentences

“In my defense, it was not my intent to write this book.” Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

“Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur—a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds—and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather’s Donkey Kong machine, but mostly Sam.” Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

“Millions of people have formulated the wish, often unexpressed, that the lessons learnt from the philosophy of Gamesmanship should be extended to include the simple problems of everyday life.” Stephen Potter, Lifemanship: Some Notes on Lifemanship with a Summary of Recent Research in Gamesmanship.

“Some years ago, there was a boomlet of books about how the Greeks or the Jews or the Scots ‘saved’ or ‘invented’ the world.” Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service.” Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth.

“It was the start of a very important year—1776—and James Cook had become a very important figure, a celebrity, a champion, a hero.” Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain Cook.

“On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.” George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.

“The first weekend of my 80 per cent [ultra-processed food] diet was one of those freakish autumn days when summer briefly returns.” Chris v. Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food.

“There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek, when 700 drunken men came at dawn with cannons, and then again four years later almost to the day the same way at the Washita River, where afterward, seven hundred Indian horses were rounded up and shot in the head.” Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“The reedy and excitable twenty-six-year-old recent Harvard Graduate, full of anticipation, was motoring out to an open field in Potsdam, Germany, to attend a Nazi youth rally.” Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

“Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.” Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

“When writing about the deep ocean, the first question that arises is: What is it? At what point does the ocean become the deep ocean?” Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.