Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk.” Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2026).

“Twilight arrived early in the Crimean mountains, with dusk falling at four thirty and darkness shortly thereafter.” Giles Milton, Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World. (2021).

“At last on Monday around ten or half past, Sybil Van Antwerp carries the mug of Irish breakfast tea with milk to her desk.” Virginia Evans, The Correspondent (2025).

“If historians were asked to identify the greatest human tragedies of all time, the Holocaust would probably top the list, for reasons both powerful and plausible.” Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding (2025).

“This is the story of three girls who were born in one world and sent, by forces beyond their comprehension, to grow up in an entirely different one.” Janice P. Nimura, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back.

“‘Do you know, when I was a child, it was the lavatory to which I retired for quiet meditation.’” Amanda Chapman, Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library (2025).

“Maralyn looked out at emptiness.” Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (2025).

“It was a muggy late-summer day in 1979 when I stepped out of the Shanghai heat into the cool marble lobby of the Peace Hotel.” Jonathan Kaufman, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China (2020).

“This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.” Niall Williams, Time of the Child (2024).

“After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had as a writer.” Michael Lewis, ed, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service (2025).

“Our story starts, appropriately enough, with a bang: the whizz of shells, the crack of gunfire.” Jeremy Dauber, American Comics: A History (2022).

“A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun.” Karen Russell, The Antidote (2025).

 “At some point in the afternoon of 17 July 1937, a tall, round-faced Ukrainian in his late thirties, whose bright eyes contrasted vividly with his smooth black hair, sat down in a hotel room in Paris to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union.” Josh Ireland, The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy (2026).

“When John Foster Dulles died on May 24, 1959, a bereft nation mourned more intensely that it had since the death of Franklin Roosevelt fourteen years before.” Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Once a month local high school kids come into my old folks home to chat with some of the residents. The students get some sort of public service credit. It’s nice; the old folks have an interaction with young kids they would not otherwise have. This month the students came in with Valentine cards they had drawn and were distributed to us. I thought that was sort of sweet until I opened mine and saw that the inscription started, “Dear Senior.”

I learned from Janice P. Nimura, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back that after Admiral Matthew Perry “opened” Japan to the West, Japan concluded that it needed to modernize, which meant adopting more Western ways. The country ended its military rule by the Shoguns in 1868. Some new leaders concluded that part of the West’s strength was educated women. Three young Japanese girls were sent to the United States to be educated similarly to American girls. After ten years, they returned to Japan, and with much difficulty they helped establish some schools for girls. The book was an interesting read about a history I knew little about.

The local library has a program starting next month for eight sessions called “Postpartum Circle,” which “navigates the adjustment to parenthood.” Sounds valuable, but I am not sure it sends the right message by being held in the Teen Room.

I bought the on-sale cookies. When I saw that the package was already opened, I asked the spouse how they were. “Tasty,” she replied. “But not very satisfying. So you have to eat a lot of them.”

I wondered as I watched the winter Olympics whether if I had lived my life isolated at the equator whether I would believe that ice is water.

A billionaire stepped down from a position “saying he had exercised ‘terrible judgment’ in keeping contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted of a sex offense in 2008.” Many other people have been ostracized for having contact with Epstein after his conviction. If these people attended parties with young teenagers after 2008 or perhaps anytime (looking at you, Mr. President), ostracism may be appropriate, or perhaps it is appropriate even if they just knew of such parties. But otherwise? Who should be shunned? All people convicted of crimes? That happens too much now and makes offenders return to society, employment, and family almost impossible. Perhaps we should shun all sex offenders, but sex offenses cover a broad swath of behaviors, from a twenty-year-old having sex with a fifteen-year-old, to exposing oneself, to collecting pornographic pictures, to brutal rapes. Should all be shunned equally? Or is it that Jeffrey Epstein should have been shunned even if the one we now ostracize did not attend the parties or know of them? We need to make distinctions. Shunning everyone convicted of a crime who has served their sentence is not good for society.

“Crime and punishment grow out of the same stem.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.