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

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.)