Setting the Tone of a Book

When I read the first two lines of Ivan Doig's This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, I knew immediately I was starting a stark, unemotional journey into the past.

"Soon after daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother's breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped."

Here we have just the facts, simply and dramatically stated without evaluation. As Doig looks back on his 1940s childhood in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, he follows those initial lines with: ...