One day : the extraordinary story of an ordinary 24 hours in America /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2019Description: pages cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780399166662
- 0399166661
- 973 23
- E185.86 .W4355 2019
- HIS036000 | SOC026030 | POL028000
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Nonfiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | 973 WEINGAR (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022441468 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A journalist pulls a random day in history from a hat to see if he can make a worthwhile news story from what happened. The result is One Day, a deeply illuminating and affecting exploration of the quiet dramas and human interaction that make a seemingly insignificant day - December 28th, 1986 - into an important, poignant part of American history.
"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 Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America"--
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Weingarten (The Fiddler in the Subway) probes a day in the life of America, chosen at random, to illustrate that there is no such thing as "an ordinary day." He settles on Sunday, December 28, 1986, which he at first deemed inauspicious, since Sundays, and the period between Christmas and New Year's, typically yields little in the way of news. Walking through the events that transpired on that day, in chronological order starting at 12 a.m., Weingarten discovers fires, murders, medical breakthroughs, racial strife, and AIDS. The author mined newspaper and TV accounts and substantiated the stories by interviewing the primary individuals still alive to flesh out their headlines, as well as others affected by the events. All happenstances continued to reverberate in surprising and often pivotal ways. The technological and scientific gains accomplished in the space of a few decades are also made plain, and the mid-1980s are evoked with just a twinge of nostalgia. VERDICT The results of this fascinating, well-researched narrative are conveyed with immediacy, insight, and humor. A solid choice for all readers.--Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., IDPublishers Weekly Review
A nondescript day in the 1980s yields unsung but riveting stories in this fascinating journalistic fishing expedition. Washington Post columnist Weingarten (The Fiddler in the Subway) picked a random day to investigate, winding up with Dec. 28, 1986: a slow-news Sunday that still yielded plenty of mayhem, oddball happenstances, and sociological watersheds. Among the events: a murder enabled a medical miracle; a rash of weather vane thefts entwined with a campus social justice crusade; a married man started down the path to womanhood; a maimed child began a long struggle to fit in; NewYork's mayor Ed Koch weathered racial turbulence; and the Cold War fizzled out for a group of Soviet refugees returning home. Drawing on present-day interviews with principals, Weingarten's reportage gives these incidents and their legacies immediacy and freshness, conveyed with punchy, evocative prose ("David was short, slight, and coarse-featured, with a feral, hunted look and an almost imperceptible hitch in his walk owing to a pin in one leg from a motorcycle accident," he writes of a protagonist in an Indiana noir saga who told detectives he was "about 90 percent sure" he did not commit a grisly double murder). The result is a trove of compelling human-interest pieces with long reverberations. (Oct.)Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist Weingarten had strangers pick a date out of a hat so that he could chronicle the news events of an ordinary day in America: December 28, 1986. As these series of episodic accounts show, there's no such thing as an ordinary day especially when a persistent reporter digs behind the headlines to uncover detailed backstories and follows through to update accounts of individuals whose lives were changed that day. Weingarten relied on original articles, subsequent reporting, ensuing investigations, court transcripts, and, whenever possible, current interviews with principal characters. The engaging recaps range between 10 and 40 pages, and are arranged chronologically, based on the approximate time the action started (12:01 a.m. through 11:55 p.m.). Topics include crime, disaster, romance, heartbreak, medicine, politics, music, and sports. While some luminaries make appearances (Ed Koch, Jerry Garcia), most of the people Weingarten covers were private citizens before some newsworthy happening launched their names onto the front page of a newspaper. 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.--Kathleen McBroom Copyright 2010 BooklistKirkus Book Review
A captivating portrait of a day in the life of the United States by a much-honored Washington Post journalist.Weingarten (The Fiddler on the Subway, 2010, etc.), the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, notes at the beginning that only one of his previous books has "even approached commercial success." His latest book is his most ambitious, with the author showing how much art a great journalist can wrest from a literary stunt with a theme as old as that of Thornton Wilder's in Our Town: Each day is remarkable in its own way. He chose a date at randomDec. 28, 1986and then found people for whom its events indelibly stamped all the days that followed. He admits that "it was a stunt. But I like stunts, particularly if they can illuminate unexpected truthsalthough great matters make for strong narratives, power can also lurk in the latent and mundane." Some of his entries give memorable glimpses of celebrities, among them New York City mayor Ed Koch, Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and dooce website founder Heather Armstrong. But Weingarten offers equally vivid profiles of the less well known. They include Prentice Rasheed, a Miami shopkeeper who accidentally electrocuted a burglar with a homemade booby trap he'd installed to deter intruders; Brad Wilson, who walked away after his helicopter flipped over and crashed during a fishing trip in the Pacific Northwest; and Eva Baisey, a nursing student from Washington, D.C., who had implanted in her body the heart of a dead murderer and who improbably has become "one of the longest-living transplant patients on the planet." One of the finest plain-prose stylists in American journalism, Weingarten tells his elegantly structured stories without sentimentality or melodrama, a virtue especially apparent in his story of two policemen who rushed into a flaming house in Falls City, Nebraska, hoping in vain to save a 2-year-old boy and 1-year-girl.A slice of American life carved out by a master of the form. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Gene Weingarten is a Washington Post journalist. He writes long-form stories as well as Below the Beltway, the weekly syndicated humor column. His previous books include I'm With Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up (with Gina Barreca); The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death ; Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs ; and The Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of his best-known work. Weingarten is the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for examining the phenomenon of parents who accidentally leave their children to bake to death in hot cars, and for an experiment in which he arranged for famed violinist Joshua Bell to busk incognito outside a Metro station in Washington, to see if anyone would notice.He lives in Washington, D.C.
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