Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon
Autor Elisa Tamarkinen Limba Engleză Hardback – 6 apr 2026
Done in a Day turns on a single event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Elisa Tamarkin’s interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her stepfather, Bob Tamarkin, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it—the last American correspondent to leave Saigon as it fell. His report was filed from a naval ship on the South China Sea at a time when no other telexes were going through.
Now, more than fifty years later, Tamarkin offers a social and cultural autopsy of that moment, based in personal history but vividly unfolding amid the vast documentation of America’s obvious defeat, which never seemed to register even as it got out, in the writings of journalists and essayists, in the backchannel cables between US ambassador Graham Martin and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and in photographs of the war’s end. The story is also set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in city newspapers—and of the newspapers themselves—once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, of bringing readers the “literature of the day” that was “done in a day.”
Done in a Day braids history, criticism, and memoir to tell the paired stories of Saigon’s liberation and the demise of the news. The result is a haunting essay about all that ended in a day—and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226846996
ISBN-10: 0226846997
Pagini: 320
Ilustrații: 32 color plates, 68 halftones
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 0226846997
Pagini: 320
Ilustrații: 32 color plates, 68 halftones
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Notă biografică
Elisa Tamarkin is the Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Cuprins
One: Done in a Day
Two: The Last Helicopter
Three: ENDIT
Four: Loose Ends
Five: Freefall
Coda: The Last Newspaper
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Bob Tamarkin, “Diary of S. Viet’s Last Hours,” Chicago Daily News, May 6, 1975
Notes
Index
Two: The Last Helicopter
Three: ENDIT
Four: Loose Ends
Five: Freefall
Coda: The Last Newspaper
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Bob Tamarkin, “Diary of S. Viet’s Last Hours,” Chicago Daily News, May 6, 1975
Notes
Index
Recenzii
“With a historian’s precision and a novelist’s sense of the absurd, Elisa Tamarkin explores the last dispatches from Vietnam sent to the Chicago Daily News. Along the way she makes us hear the death rattles of a great literary topos, the war correspondent, and the demise of the news itself as we once took it for granted. The full-blown orgy of our exodus from Saigon emerges here, on the heels of persistent denial, as one of many unforgettable scenes. In the wry and existential tradition of Graham Greene, Tamarkin’s beautifully restrained voice, tender and disabused, is a literary achievement of the highest order.”
“Just when you think that all that can be written about the Vietnam War has been written comes Elisa Tamarkin’s riveting Done in a Day. The book is like lightning, capturing the madness of that war’s many years into its final few hours. A brilliant book.”
“Drawing on the papers of her late stepfather—the last journalist on the last helicopter out of Saigon on the day it fell—Elisa Tamarkin has written a tour de force of cultural history that encompasses both the end of the Vietnam War and the decline of foreign correspondence. I have never read as compelling a book about endings, the difficulty of ending, the ongoingness of endings. Done in a Day creates a vortex that pulls an astonishing range of ideas, archives, and images into a poignant reflection on war, news, memory, diplomacy, and the toxic effects of American ‘innocence.’”
“Done in a Day is an extraordinary work of archival forensics, intellectual history, philosophical meditation, and cultural dissection in one. Tamarkin probes the force of endings left unacknowledged, their facts evacuated by the stories being told about them. Lucid, unsparing, and bracingly original, Done in a Day explores the practices of Vietnam-era correspondence around the telling of a war that never officially began and whose actual outcomes became a matter of mass deception and reinvention: a political legacy for our time. This story is, in part, Tamarkin’s own; no one else could have told it with such brio or resolve.”
“Just when you think that all that can be written about the Vietnam War has been written comes Elisa Tamarkin’s riveting Done in a Day. The book is like lightning, capturing the madness of that war’s many years into its final few hours. A brilliant book.”
“Drawing on the papers of her late stepfather—the last journalist on the last helicopter out of Saigon on the day it fell—Elisa Tamarkin has written a tour de force of cultural history that encompasses both the end of the Vietnam War and the decline of foreign correspondence. I have never read as compelling a book about endings, the difficulty of ending, the ongoingness of endings. Done in a Day creates a vortex that pulls an astonishing range of ideas, archives, and images into a poignant reflection on war, news, memory, diplomacy, and the toxic effects of American ‘innocence.’”
“Done in a Day is an extraordinary work of archival forensics, intellectual history, philosophical meditation, and cultural dissection in one. Tamarkin probes the force of endings left unacknowledged, their facts evacuated by the stories being told about them. Lucid, unsparing, and bracingly original, Done in a Day explores the practices of Vietnam-era correspondence around the telling of a war that never officially began and whose actual outcomes became a matter of mass deception and reinvention: a political legacy for our time. This story is, in part, Tamarkin’s own; no one else could have told it with such brio or resolve.”