One Day: The Extraordinary Story Of An Ordinary 24 Hours In Americaby Gene Weingarten
Rating: ★★★★★
isbn: 9780399166662
Publication Date: October 22, 2019
Pages: 375
Genre: History
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten explores the events of a random day in U.S. history, offering a diorama of American life that illuminates all that has changed—and all that hasn’t—in the past three decades.
On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day—chosen completely at random—turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.
That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.
One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as “ordinary” when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.
The subtitle of this book should have been The Extraordinary Stories of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America; it would have better encapsulated what this book is about, in a way.
A day was chosen at random – December 28, 1986 – and Weingarten digs into the stories and events that happened in that 24 hours, fleshing out their backstories and, in some cases, providing epilogues (I appreciated this; it always annoys me that news outlets rarely follow up on stories). Some of them are beyond tragic; events that were catalysts for change both at home and around the world. Some of the stories are terrible and shocking on a more personal level, and many are hopeful, a few inspiring, and a couple are downright cheerful.
I remember being drawn to this book by the striking cover, and thinking that I’d enjoyed Bill Bryson’s One Summer, so I grabbed it on impulse when it first came out. It languished on my TBR for the last 3 years, give or take, until I finally grabbed it last weekend, and it grabbed me right back. Weingarten is a journalist, so the narrative voice is unapologetically journalistic, but he’s a 2 time Pulitzer winning journalist, so the writing is excellent. I found myself deeply involved in each and every story – even the ones I’d really rather have been more detached from. I was both reading parts out to MT, and telling him you really need to read this yourself. The stories are American, but very few of them are uniquely American; they’re stories of the human experience and for the most part could be the experiences of anyone, anyplace.
Weingarten didn’t quite stick the landing; the wrap up was a tiny bit messy and might have been tighter, neater, had he ended it a page sooner, but it’s a negligible niggle and really didn’t detract from a fascinating read.