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An intrepid author sets himself a remarkable task: to find the most perfectly average person in the nation
PublicAffairs
November 2005
320 pages ISBN: 158648270X Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
John Q Public. Plain Jane. The Average Joe. We think we
know the type, but have we ever actually met the person? To
be the perfectly average American is harder than it might
seem: You must live within three miles of a McDonald's, and
two miles of a public park; you must be better off
financially than your parents, but earn no more than
$75,000 a year; you must believe in God and the literal
truth of the Bible, yet hold some views that traditional
churches have deemed sacrilegious. Equipped with his trusty Mr. Q, a notebook that he has
compiled with over 1,000 facts about the Average American,
Kevin O'Keefe has completed a tour of America in search of
the sublimely ordinary, the man and woman who each
represent most definitively all that is average in our
country. In his travels from New York to Nevada, Pennsylvania to
Hawaii, Kansas to Connecticut and beyond, O'Keefe talks
business and pleasure with the proprietors of Average Joe
and Jane Athletics, visits the polls on election day with
the first candidate for the Average American party,
bypasses both Peoria and Normal, Illinois (for, as he
explains, they are not that normal), watches the magician
Myklar the Ordinary wow the kids at a church in rural
Maryland, and delivers a fascinating, often surprising,
look into the history and culture of the common man and
woman. At the end of the road he discovers that the Average
American is, up close, rather extraordinary.
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