Elisa Tamarkin - "Done in A Day" - Deborah L. Nelson

Elisa Tamarkin will discuss her new book Done in A Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. She will be joined in conversation by Deborah L. Nelson. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion. About the Book: How does it feel to recognize a historical ending while still living through it? Named one of LitHub’s most anticipated books of the year, Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon reconstructs the final days of the Vietnam War through the papers of the author’s stepfather, the Chicago Daily News Saigon bureau chief, who filed the last American correspondent’s report as Saigon fell in 1975. Social historian Elisa Tamarkin connects this personal history to the changing culture of war correspondence and the decline of the city newspaper, offering a meditation on how we understand, and record, the end of an era. Tamarkin will situate the evacuation of Saigon in the mindset of the 1970s, psychologies of belief and defeat, existentialist philosophy, and the ongoing problem of raising political consciousness around world events, even when we have access to all the information we ever need to know. About the Author: Elisa Tamarkin is the Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance and Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon, both published by the University of Chicago Press. About the Interlocutor: Deborah L. Nelson is Dean of the Arts & Humanities Division at the University of Chicago and the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and chair of the department of English. Her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book of 2017 and the Gordan Laing Prize in 2019 for the most distinguished contribution to the University of Chicago Press by a faculty member. Named one of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of the year. A searing reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of foreign reporting in the nation's daily newspapers.