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First Sentences

“This was me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.” Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis.

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” William Goldman, The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure.

“’Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?’” Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days.

“The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.” S. Morgenstern, The Princess Bride.

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist whom most people can name.” Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.

“Fezzik chased the madman up the mountain, the madman who carried the most precious thing, for Fezzik, ever to be on earth, the kid herself, Buttercup’s Baby.” S. Morgenstern, Buttercup’s Baby: S. Morgenstern’s Glorious Examination of Courage Matched Against the Death of the Heart.

“I was performing since I was just a little boy.” Al Pacino, Sonny Boy.

“I must have died, the woman thought.” Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets.

“On July 27, 1791, some four months after Alexander Hamilton and Federalist-dominated Congress passed ‘the Whiskey Tax,’ the frontier offered an organized response for the first time.” Brady J. Crytzer, The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis.

“Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“The story begins with sheep.” John Butman & Simon Targett, New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers.

“Lilacs, rain, a hint of bitter chocolate: Stella sniffed the air as she entered the small shop, enjoying the soft golden light that enfolded her.” Ruth Reichl, The Paris Novel.

“It looked like war.” Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.

“The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry.” Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers.

“On January 21, 1989, the day after George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for Louisiana’s eighty-first legislative district.” John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

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Snippets

Charlie Kirk said, “George Floyd was a scumbag. Does that mean he deserved to die? No, of course not.” Replace “George Floyd” with “Charlie Kirk.” What would the outcry be?

Pete Hegseth wants “warriors” in this man’s army. Apparently, according to Hegseth, warriors don’t have beards. I watch Sunday football, and many of the players have quite luxurious facial growths. Apparently, at least according to Hegseth, I was wrong if I thought of them as manly men. They have beards. They are wusses. A tradition in the NHL is for players not to shave as long as they are in the playoffs. Once again, they are pansies, not warriors. Hegseth wants lethality in our armed forces. Nothing produced more deaths in our history than the Civil War. After hearing Hegseth, I don’t know how the North won with the bearded Ulysses S. Grant in charge. I thought he was a warrior, but apparently just another wuss. Maybe his side won because the Confederates had bearded Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Those two must have been really big pansies if they lost to Grant. Certainly, the fairy Custer, with his hair, could not be in Hegseth’s army. And in World War II, Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, who were on the front lines for the entire war, were never clean shaven. If they were still around, they might like to know that they are not wanted in Hegseth’s army. So they can just go home.

In the wake of Kirk’s death, I ask, not for the first time, What is a Christian?

Perhaps if General Grant and General Eisenhower had spent less time on military strategy, tactics, and logistics and more on pullups, pushups, and sit-ups, the Civil War and World War II would have ended sooner. I wondered, too, if the generals who were flown from all four corners of the world to Virginia (at enormous expense, one might add) might have had better things to do than to sit in a lecture on sartorial issues and calisthenics.

At my new residence I am about to start a six-week course on the musical theater. The first week, we will study the seminal Oklahoma! When I watched a video of it, I realized that I knew most of the music, but I have no idea how. I have never seen a live production of the musical and only clips of the movie. When I was a boy, our family did not have a record player much less a hi-fi. We did have a radio, but I don’t believe I ever heard show tunes out of it. Still, I know much of the score. How do we learn the stuff we do?

Pete Hegseth seems not to want women in the armed forces. He certainly does not want transgender men. I wonder what his reaction would be to what Tony Horwitz relates in his Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998). As a result of an automobile accident in 1911, a union Civil War hero was discovered to be a woman. She was then sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear skirts, in which she was clumsy. She died as the result of a hip injury after a fall. Horwitz reports that at least 400 women disguised as men fought in the Civil War.

When I was eight or nine, the news was filled with UFO sightings. I wanted to spot one and spent much time in the backyard gazing upward. I was getting discouraged when one day as I looked over the Schneidermann house I saw what appeared to be a rotating, silvery disk. It came closer and hovered almost silently about fifty feet off the ground at the back of our property. A hatch slid open, and a creature came down on a beam of light. It got to the grass just outside the kohlrabi patch, but I could not discern any features. It was fully covered in hair. I could not tell if there was a head, or arms, or feet because of all the hair. But there was what appeared to be a hypodermic needle coming out of where the head might have been. Father must have seen the lights because he was standing just behind me. With my voice that had not broken, I asked, “What is that?” “My last-born son,” he intoned, “that is definitely a furry with the syringe on the top.”

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First Sentences

“It’s a favorite pastime of Americans, and American conservatives especially, to keep watch for various evildoers scheming to seize the public sphere and rob of us our historic liberties.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Richard Cadogan raised his revolver, took careful aim and pulled the trigger.” Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop.

“Can you remember meeting William Shakespeare for the first time?” Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race.

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog name Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of fine spring afternoon.” James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss.

“Olmsted’s letter from Texas about the romance of nomadism was tailored to its recipient: Anne Charlotte Lynch, a New York poet, globe-trotting traveler, and eminent convener of literary salons.” Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.

“The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.” P.D. James, A Taste for Death.

“Rain drums Chicago’s gridded streets on the early morning of June 9, 1880.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

“The Dean, as he lay awake in bed that memorable Sunday night, pondered the astonishing vagaries of the weather.” Michael Gilbert, Close Quarters.

“On May 2, 1938, three special trains, carrying hundreds of German diplomats, government officials, Nazi Party leaders, security agents, and journalists, left Berlin accompanying the Führer on his first—and what would turn out to be his last—visit to Rome.” David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty.” Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor.

“It is hard to imagine working with books—writing an essay, a lecture, a report, a sermon—without the ability to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily: without, that is, the convenience of a good index.” Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.

“The most powerful man in Indiana stood next to the new governor at the Inaugural Ball, there to be thanked, applauded, and blessed for using the nation’s oldest domestic terror group to gain control of a uniquely American state.” Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan? Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.

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First Sentences

“Not so long ago, it was less than ideal for an American politician to seem like a dumbass.” Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.

“She got to the parking lot earlier than usual.” Natsuo Kirino, Out (translated by Stephen Snyder).

“The only lodging in Grafton was a low-slung motel with a smashed door at the entrance.” Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.

“Vespasia stood at the long, open window of her hotel bedroom and gazed across the rooftops of the city toward the western sky.” Anne Perry, A Christmas Message.

“I didn’t spend a year building a wooden flatboat and then sailing it two thousand miles down the Mississippi to New Orleans simply because I was suffering from a Huck Finn complex, although that certainly played a part.” Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure.

“In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.” Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None.

“Beginning on September 15, 1987, and continued for an amazing twelve days, the hearings over the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork for the United States Supreme Court mesmerized the nation.” Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.

“Next to hot chicken soup, a tattoo of an anchor on your chest, and penicillin, I consider a honeymoon one of the most overrated events in the world.” Erma Bombeck, If Life is a Bowl of Cherries—What am I Doing in the Pits?

“It was as black in the closet as old blood.” Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

“The Scopes trial has dogged me for more than a decade, ever since I wrote my first book on the American controversy of creation and evolution.” Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.

“The oldest written record of the word tennis makes no mention of athletic shoes; rather, it refers solely to the sport from which they take their name; a sport that—along with fencing, its near kin—was one of the first to require a special kind of footwear.” Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death.

“Poised to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln found he could not write his name.” Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

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Snippets

“I wouldn’t mind paying taxes, if I knew they were going to a friendly country.” Dick Gregory.

President Biden is a disappointment. He has visited scenes of natural disasters and not once flicked out rolls of paper towels.

How old do you have to be to understand why I was taught to squeeze the toothpaste tube only from the bottom?

I am wondering when Florida or some other state will ban reruns of “Star Trek.” Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998) reports that some white supremacists protested the show because to them, Mr. Spock—half human, half-Vulcan—was a coded promoter of miscegenation.

A story in a Jimmy Carter biography that I hope is true: Carter had said that he followed what his parents taught him, and he would never tell a lie. A reporter interviewed Jimmy’s mother and asked whether it was true that the Carters told no lies. Miss Lillian replied, “Maybe a little white one.” Asked for an example, Miss Lillian continued, “Remember how when you walked in here, I told you how sweet and pretty you were?”

Some people have tact and others tell the truth.

We had made it to the open sky after ascending the steep, slippery, worn, damp stairs. We were wet from the plunge in the cave’s pool, a cenote. At the picnic table next to us, two women were also toweling off. One then began putting on suntan lotion. I said that if she were planning to go into another cenote a few hundred meters away, that was mistake since she would just have to wash it off. To keep the waters in cenotes uncontaminated, swimmers must shower off lotions, perfumes, deodorants, and the like before going into the water. Even though you might think of Yucatan as a warm place, the cenote showers are colder than any mixed drinks I had there. I learned that the women were from the Netherlands. I asked to see their thumbs. They looked puzzled. I said that I heard that the Dutch all had large thumbs to plug holes in the dikes. This is a witticism I invariably drop when meeting someone from Holland because it invariably amuses me and no one else. One was a nurse and the other a social worker. They worked together in a drug addiction clinic for 18–24-year-olds. Even in the civilized Netherlands addiction destroys lives. It was sad that they said that fentanyl was becoming an increasing problem.

A boss a while back was being interviewed on television. He said that, of course, no one actually made the median salary. Yet another reason, I thought, to get out of the job I was in.

An elderly woman at the pharmacy was deciding which of her drugs she should take home because she could not afford them all. I felt very sadly American as the scene unfolded.

A few years back an observer said, “Our forefathers objected to taxation without representation. Now we would be glad to get taxation without misrepresentation.”

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Snippets

Would you be whining about your work if you had an incredibly powerful job, could have it as long you wanted, work full-time nine months of the year, and make enough to put you in the top 2% of earners with the chance to make even more? And yet here is John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, publicly bemoaning that Americans question the legitimacy of his Court. Apparently, he is so unhappy that so many see his work as illegitimate that he is going to resign. Just kidding.

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.” George Eliot.

I have listened to the summer sounds. I take my coffee and reading material to the porch as the light is dawning and pause periodically to listen to the bird songs, even though I cannot identify any of the calls. After dinner and dusk, I take a book to the porch and pause in my reading to hear the symphony of the cicadas. During the daylight I hear deer, chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits rustling the dry leaves in the woodlot next to my reading spot. But, unfortunately, during the day I also hear the summer sounds of lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, and backhoes.

It must be a sign of age: I think of my youth as all the time before I was sixty-eight.

A fact that surprised me: The first medal awarded to an American at the 1936 Berlin Olympics was for art. Art competitions were part of the summer games until 1948.

Another fact that surprised me: Iceland has no ants.

A recurring question that mystifies me: Why are Americans so besotted with the un-American institution of the British royalty?

Sometimes when conservatives rail against critical race theory they betray complete ignorance of what it is. Perhaps they oppose it because they think that it is a system for picking horses.

 “In the middle of the twentieth century, any Mississippi schoolchild who achieved an eighth-grade education had been exposed to a state history textbook [Mississippi through Four Centuries] that told of the glories of the Klan. In discussing Reconstruction, it said the Klan whipped and even killed Blacks ‘who had been giving trouble in a community. . . . The organization helped the South at a difficult time.’” Curtis Wilkie, When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer. (2021).

Tony Horwitz, in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998), reports that a visitor to a civil war battlefield asked a park ranger why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks.

The philosopher said, “Half of wisdom is being silent when you have nothing to say.”