Last week we looked at the first lines of Mitt Romney’s books. Today we examine the first lines of President Obama’s. First, from Dreams From My Father:
A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.
And then this one, from The Audacity of Hope:
On most days I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway train carries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through and underground tunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states.
Okay, so what do we think about these bad boys? I think it’s apparent that the president writes with a little more flare than Governor Romney- then again, we would probably expect that from the man whose mug adorns the iconic HOPE poster. But while the first example above carries a pretty great hook (what was the news?!), the second one is a relatively pedestrian opening to a book we already know is going to be political. I would definitely read on after the first first line above- and I’d be pretty ambivalent about reading on after the second one. (Unless I were the owner of an iconic HOPE poster, that is.)
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