One Day

 

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a the equivalent of a journalism triple crown. It was entertaining--each chapter dealt with a different story but they were all intriguing and thought provoking in their own way. Weingarten is talented at making even day to day drama engaging. It was also journalism at its best. How he found out the things that happened on that day to start with must have been challenging in some instances, and then he dug into each story to talk about its pertinence and its breadth, so the reader is filled in on not just the story but the background and place in culture, politics, etc.(There are a few times when he may have overshot a bit and tried to make a story more than it was). And then for the coup de grace, Weingarten illustrates through all these stories, that each day is a building block. It could be the start of something, the end of something, or a turning point along the way, but we won't know until its in the past. "The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past"--Virginia Woolf


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The God of Journalism is just. He rewards effort. Time and again in my life He comes through for me, but only after I decide to conduct that last interview, the one I don’t really think I need, or badger someone more than I’m entirely comfortable with, or stay at a scene longer than I’d planned, just to see what happens.

Such wounds—insults in the curiously mannered lexicon of medicine—

The celebration was somewhat disproportionate to the accomplishment; the operation was technically not all that difficult, except in the degree of nerve it took to attempt it.

Craig Peyer had betrayed his badge, and it then betrayed him.

“The government issued you things, they gave you a place to live, they gave you whatever they felt you needed. You became entitled, dependent, compliant, and complacent. You were kind of on perpetual welfare—your basics are taken care of, but you are not well off. You learned to accept that. You remained a child. When my parents arrived here in 1979, my father was forty and my mother was thirty, and they didn’t know to put money in the bank, they didn’t know what real estate was. The adjustment was apocalyptic. It gave them a feeling of cultural incompetence.”

Each moment becomes once again just another in a series of unremarkable moments, instead of a soul-searing blast of the inexpressible wonder of being.