For starters, find something great
It may be impossible to determine if a book is good, bad, or indifferent by its cover, but the title is frequently a dead give away. Thank goodness, “The High-Bouncing Lover” became “The Great Gatsby.”
What if “War And Peace” were sold under its original title, “War: What Is It Good For”? (Just kidding. Seinfeld alert!)
I tend to think the quality of a book – or, at least, whether I want to read one or not – can be determined by its opening lines. I’m looking for something that draws me in. I want to get lost in a work of history or biography. And I want to go down the rabbit hole quickly, and easily.
Here’s an example. It’s the opening of Harold Holzer’s “Lincoln at Cooper Union,” which, come to think of it, is not an especially jazzy title for such a terrific book.
Holzer writes: “The train bearing a weary but exultant Abraham Lincoln home from nearby De Witt County lumbered into Springfield, Illinois, on Saturday evening, October 15, 1859. No one was there to greet him. Lincoln disembarked, strode past the brick depot, and commenced the brief, four-block walk along the gas-lit streets that led to his house. The weather was ‘fine and bracing,’ with a touch of frost in the air.”
In my mind’s eye, I can see it all.
The start of a vastly different book, “The Boys of Summer,” by Roger Kahn, about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, goes like this: “The morning began with rain and hairy clouds. It was late March and day rose brisk and uncertain, with gusts suggesting January and flashes of sun promising June. In every way, a season of change had come.”
Cornelius Ryan begins “The Longest Day” by telling us the Normandy village of La Roche-Guyon “was silent in the damp June morning.”
John Hersey prepares the way for the horror that follows in the pages of “Hiroshima” with this sentence: “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, Japanese time, at the moment when the atom bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the office plant and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”
Wow.
The intrigue and romance of politics comes vividly to life in two books I read in the long-ago, Teddy White’s “The Making of the President 1960” and James MacGregor Burn’s “The Lion and the Fox,” a “political biography” of FDR.
“It was invisible, as always,” White starts out. “They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. His men had canvassed Hart’s Location….”
After a miles-high overview, Burns zooms in on the place of Roosevelt’s birth in “The Lion and the Fox.” Thus: “About halfway from Albany to New York the Hudson River plows into a narrow channel, crooks slightly leftward, and then resumes its promenade toward the Atlantic. East of the bend lie a railroad and a siding; from the siding a dirt road climbs steep slopes, through dense woods, to a gently rolling plateau.”
Next stop: the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park.
Now, there are exceptions to every rule. I almost didn’t buy Thomas Childers’ “The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,” based on its dull opening, a line or two about the time and place of the monster Adolf Hitler’s birth.
Afterward, Childers’ high-stakes narrative kicks into gear.
I can see a pattern emerging here. I’m a sucker for beginnings which evoke a particular time or place.
“It began in the cold,” Arthur Schlesinger writes in the opening scene of his history of the Kennedy administration, “A Thousand Days. “It had been cold all week in Washington. Then early Thursday it began to snow. The winds blew in icy, stinging gusts (oh, those gusts!) and whipped the snow down frigid streets…. By six o’clock traffic had stopped all over town. People abandoned their cars and marched grimly into the gale…”
It was the night before the 1961 Inauguration.
Or how about this by Rick Atkinson from his “An Army at Dawn,” the story of the U.S. military in the first months of World War II?
“A few minutes past 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 22, 1942, (Atkinson writes) a twin engine Navy passenger plane broke through the low overcast blanketing Washington, D.C., then banked over the Potomac River for the final approach to Anacosta Field. As the white dome of the Capitol loomed into view, Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt allowed himself a small sigh of relief.”
An arresting beginning sentence or paragraph is a minor art form. It can be both a delight and a precursor. Happy reading, everyone.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.