One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America Audiobook (Free)

On New Year’s Time 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck per day, month, and year from a hat. That day-chosen completely at random-turned out to end up being Sunday, Dec 28, 1986, by any typical measure a most ordinary time. Weingarten spent another six years showing that there is no such thing.

That Weekend between Xmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, about One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling occasions of human being connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were dropped. Lives were preserved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never managed to get into the news; they were personal dramas in the lives of personal people. They were utterly compelling.

One Day asks and answers the issue of whether there is even such a thing as “normal” when we are discussing how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.