How Life is Lived: Readings

Gene Weingarten, the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, is a Washington Post journalist. He writes long-form stories as well as Below the Beltway, the weekly syndicated humor column. His previous books include I’m With Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up (with Gina Barreca); The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death; Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs; and The Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of his best-known work. One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America (Blue Rider Press) is the story of Sunday, December 28, 1986, a day that was literally picked out of a hat by three strangers. With that date in hand, Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing as an ordinary day. 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. A starred review in Kirkus called One Day "A captivating portrait of a day in the life of the United States ... One of the finest plain-prose stylists in American journalism, Weingarten tells his elegantly structured stories without sentimentality or melodrama... A slice of American life carved out by a master of the form."

Tim O’Brien, novels include The Things They Carried, Pulitzer Finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century; Going After Cacciato, which received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. In Dad’s Maybe Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Tim O’Brien shares wisdom from a life in letters, lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons. In 2003, already an older father, O’Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him—a few scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe a word of advice. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their aging father, a man they might never really know. For the next fifteen years, the author talked to his sons on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living. In the process, he traverses the great variety of human experience and emotion  — moving from soccer games to warfare, from alcoholism to magic shows, history lessons and bittersweet bedtime stories, always returning to a father’s soul-saving love for his sons.