Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon
Unusual and imaginative ... Tamarkin has a fresh angle on the fall of Saigon, a personal one: her stepfather, Bob Tamarkin, flew out on the last civilian helicopter ... An unclassifiable book. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography ... Maybe the correct genre for Done in a Day is elegy. Tamarkin’s book is a kind of time capsule of the late sixties and early seventies ... There is a bit of romanticizing here, but it’s a personal story; she’s entitled.
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Mesmerizing ... It’s a simple enough story—one that, again, would be easy to romanticize—but as Tamarkin notes, that would be to mistake the perspective of the reporters, of the 'West,' for the only one ... Avoids telling the story in a straightforward way, one that might overly valorize the correspondents and their trade, using her father’s time in Vietnam instead as a frame for an impressionistic and nonlinear consideration of one day and the way it was understood.
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Examines the chaotic last hours of the Vietnam War ... Compellingly argues that denial, information overload, and political amnesia allowed the futile war to drag on ... Blending history, memoir, media studies, and cultural theory, Tamarkin’s book reveals how war, technology, and narratives shape collective memory.
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