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It's hard to beat this premise � the history of one day in recent American history, chosen through three random draws out of a hat (month, date and year) � and it's hard to beat the way Gene Weingarten executes it.

The day � December 28, 1986 � is almost perfectly nondescript, as well as perfectly situated between the two worlds bifurcated by the rise of the personal computer and internet. It also helps that it takes place in the year I turned 4 years old, when I was too yoiung to remember but old enough to be influenced by the culture this book explores.

And what a culture! The rise of AIDS, the seething-yet-ignored racism, the big hair, the last vestiges of kids doing whatever the hell they wanted until dinner, the days when creepers and killers could operate without international media coverage, and everyday men and women living their lives unaware of how their very way of being would be upended in less than a decade by enormous technological forces unleashed by young men with names like Gates and Jobs just then coming into their own.

Weingarten distills all of this into what amounts to 18 short stories � each a separate chronicle not only of what happened at a specific time that day, but also the events leading up to it and spiraling away from it. In some cases, that involves issues as complicated as race, AIDS and politics; in others, it's as simple as a grieving father's activism or a conflicted man's decision to change his sex.

His writing style is what you'd expect from an award-winning newspaper columnist. It's the easygoing, almost jocular style of the human interest writer. He knows how to spin a yarn, in other words, and how to keep the reader guessing until the last minute. That works almost all of the time; sometimes, the story is really so mundane that it can't support the tension Weingarten attempts to create, and sometimes the story is so serious and engrossing that Weingarten's informality is distracting.

But overall, it's nearly perfect; any book whose basis is drawn out of a hat can't take itself too seriously, even if it's the product of six years of research. Weingarten seems to understand that, and as a result, he creates a work that's greater than the sum of its parts: a beautiful collection of stories that serve as a snapshot of an era long vanished.