Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Jean McConville was thirty-eight when she disappeared, and she had spent nearly half her life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth.” Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

“I didn’t believe them. They had said that it was going to be easy and, like the fool I am, I believed them.” Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished.

“Two Pennsylvania State Police troopers sat inside an unmarked car waiting for the go-ahead to do something they had never done before, arrest a Catholic priest for lying to a grand jury.” Matt Birkbeck, Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino.

“Name almost any job: dental hygienist, rodeo clown, dog walker, mall Santa, chicken-sexer—they all demand some kind of definable skill set. The one exception is a member of Congress.” Bill Maher, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

“In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates.” Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me.

“In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“As dawn broke over New York City on Friday morning, April 6, 1917, newsboys hawked the city’s paper from street corners up and down Manhattan.” Christopher C. Gorham, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America.

“I approached Texas Monthly’s cover story on ‘The Top 50 BBQ Joints in Texas’ this summer the way a regular of People might approach that magazine’s annual ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ feature—with the expectation of seeing some familiar names.” Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas.

“With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false.” Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.

“Her majesty disliked what she considered to be overheated homes.” Tim Mason, The Darwin Affair.

“In the spring of 1994, I first traveled though China’s Xinjiang Province, a region inhabited by 11 million Turkic Uighur Muslims who, as learned from interview after interview, were even then trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression by the Chinese authorities.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.

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.