Wampum

Page 23, Sentence 5

Via Talk Left, I learned of the following instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

In my case, my computer sits near my post WWII American history shelf. Three books were equidistant. The first was The Fifties by David Halberstam. The sentence concerned Harry Truman:

If his language when he was young was that of a rural Missouri boy, filled with crude references to African-Americans as “niggers,” he went beyond his predecessors in terms of activism for civil rights; if his letters had once been filled with unkind references to Jews and New York as “kike town,” he, more than any other politician in the world, was responsible for the creation of Israel.

The second was Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 by Stephen E. Ambrose (back when he actually wrote his own books):

Two days before Nixon left the States, Kennedy had made a dramatic appeal for peace in a major address at American University.

The third was Taylor Branch’s superb Pillar of Fire: America In The King Years 1963-65:

Their dream was to make of this largest voluntary body of Negroes in the world -- upward of ten thousand preachers and some five million members—a ready-made civil rights phalanx that upon command could descend upon segregated targets for protest or Christian revival.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at April 26, 2004 02:42 PM | TrackBack