True stories about what happened to ordinary and not so ordinary Americans over the day of Sunday, December 28, 1986 are related in gripping prose in this interesting book by the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter. The date was chosen at random by two children and a waitress in a D.C. diner where the author and his publisher dined as they planned the outline. With the only restriction being that it had to be between 1969 and 1989, they had agreed to accept the date and find interesting people to relate what had happened to them on that date, often interviewing surviving friends, family members, coworkers and acquaintances.
From the gripping detailed story of a pioneering heart transplant, (with an interview with the recipient) at a Virginia hospital after a murder-suicide to the more mundane, most of the stories involve tragedies or heart-wrenching decisions by tormented individual Americans. Yes, all the stories are from the U.S.A. Only one does not feature the main event in the subject’s lives as occurring on December 28, 1986- it seems as though the author felt obliged to include one story about gender switching. Several relate the experiences of different individuals in different parts of the country, on themes such as AIDS, racism, crime, immigration, politics, and the strange background of the troubled former Ottawa Senator’s forward Bobby Ryan aka Bobby Stevenson. How the nineteen main stories were chosen is a bit of a mystery that Weingarten does not divulge. He may have enough material for a sequel using a different date as a focus.
The writing is straightforward prose loaded with humorous small details, in spite of the horror of some of the events, and a keen eye for the quirky twists of the real character’s lives, some famous, but many not well known. It is well researched with over 500 interviews, and extensive searches of archival material. In the Acknowledgments Weingarten realizes that there will inevitably be errors in any work based on people’s recall of distant events.
From the last story: “We are all serving time on death row; only the length of our stay is indeterminate.” From the Acknowledgments: “ He has the sensitivity of a corduroy condom.”
A great peek into the complexity of American culture in a bygone era.
The Passionate Reader 