One Day

The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America

By: Gene Weingarten

Narrated by: Johnathan McClain

Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

"One of the 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years" (Slate)

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.

©2019 Gene Weingarten (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

A 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 Yorker)

"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, NPR's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" and author of The Incomplete Book of Running)