With a historians precision and a novelists 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, Tamarkins beautifully restrained voice, tender and disabused, is a literary achievement of the highest order. * Alice Kaplan, author of "Seeing Baya" * Just when you think that all that can be written about the Vietnam War has been written comes Elisa Tamarkins riveting Done in a Day. The book is like lightning, capturing the madness of that wars many years into its final few hours. A brilliant book. * Greg Grandin, author of "The End of Myth" * Drawing on the papers of her late stepfatherthe last journalist on the last helicopter out of Saigon on the day it fellElisa 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. * Deborah L. Nelson, author of "Tough Enough" * 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, Tamarkins own; no one else could have told it with such brio or resolve. * Sara Blair, author of "How the Other Half Looks" *
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