Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon by Tamarkin, Elisa
Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon by Tamarkin, Elisa

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon

Named one of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of the year.A searing reflection on the last day...
$33.60 USD
$33.60 USD
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Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $33.60
Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon by Tamarkin, Elisa

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon

$33.60
Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon by Tamarkin, Elisa

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon

$33.60
Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description

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.

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, 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.

Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 04/28/2026
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780226846996


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2026 pg. 113

About the Author
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.
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