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One Day

the Extraordinary Story of An Ordinary 24 Hours in America
Dec 24, 2019PimaLib_NormS rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Occasionally, someone else’s wonderful idea will come to my attention, causing me to smack my forehead in frustration and exclaim, “Dang, I wish I had thought of that!” “One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America” by Gene Weingarten is the cause of my latest outburst of cranial violence (Full disclosure: I used a different word than “dang”, however). Maybe it has been done before and I’m simply unaware of it, but when casting about for a book idea, this one must have seemed like a big bowl of “oh, yeah!” Pick a day, totally at random, research the heck out of it, then write it all down, and there’s your book. That is a good . . . no . . . that is a great idea. Through a series of blind draws, December 28, 1986 became the chosen day. Weingarten was a bit disappointed with this date because it happened to be the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, a notoriously slow day for news. But, as it turned out, it was perfect for such an endeavor. No cataclysmic historical events happened on that day to overwhelm the intriguing, sometimes compelling, formerly anonymous stories that make up the chapters in this book. This was just another day in America. Not to the people featured in pages of “One Day”, however. Gene Weingarten’s obvious point here is that momentous, life-altering events happen in anonymity to people every day of the year.