One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America

Product Description

“One of the 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years”—SlateOn 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.

Review

One of the 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 YearsSlateA Best Book of the Year The Washington Post Slate Parade New York Post The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel“The book adds up to something greater than the individual stories…. Weingarten taps into the wonder of what it is to be alive.”—Mike Hill, for the Associated Press“An absorbing snapshot of America.”—The New YorkerMore praise for
One Day
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less interested in elaborate fictions or spectacular histories and just want to know how life is lived. I want a book about how other humans get things and lose things, and deal with both, how they cope and how they fail and how they live and how they die. This is the book I’ve been waiting for. The people described in this book are wonderful and flawed, some of them evil, some of them impossibly good. But none of them have lived the kind of lives that normally get told in books, and in finally seeking them out and telling their stories, Gene has done them, and us, a priceless service.”—
Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” and author of
The Incomplete Book of Running
“Extraordinary tales from an ordinary day, masterfully fashioned. Because Weingarten is such a compelling storyteller, it’s easy to overlook how much A+  journalism undergirds
One Day. Every detail, every quote, is not just the answer to a question; it’s the answer to precisely the right question.”—
Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury

“I loved this book. I ripped through it in an evening. I couldn’t put it down.”—
Petra Mayer on NPR’s “Here & Now”

“An excellent book…humble yet profound.”
—Guardian 

“[Weingarten has] uncommon storytelling gifts…. The two-time Pulitzer winner and 
Washington Post columnist takes a single day in history and weaves together multiple stories of tragedy, revelation and wonder. 
One Day is full of scenes and wordsmithing that can make a reader elbow her partner in the ribs and force him to listen to a read-aloud. That’s the hallmark of memorable feature writing. More, please.”—
Washington Post

“One of the Best Books of 2019.”—
Washington Post
 
“A captivating portrait of a day in the life of the United States by a much-honored
Washington Post journalist… One of the finest plain-prose stylists in American journalism, Weingarten tells his elegantly structured stories without sentimentality or melodrama… A slice of American life carved out by a master of the form.”—
Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Everybody loves a good story, especially when it’s told by a master storyteller. This collection should have wide appeal, whether read straight through, cover to cover, or dipped into for an occasional article.”—
Booklist (starred review)“[
One Day] is a stunt, a dare, but it’s also proof of the be