“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.”

“Mesmerizing. . . . Though Done in a Day is in part an elegy for the newspaper business, Elisa Tamarkin resists turning the book into a straightforward hagiography. What results instead is a startlingly original meditation on the last day of the U.S. War in Vietnam and the end of the newspaper business—one that makes clear that, as much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.”

“Unusual and imaginative. . . . 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. . . . For the end of the [Vietnam] war was also, it turns out, the beginning of the end of the American daily. . . The world of the daily reporter is lovingly close-read (which is what English professors do), from the telex machine that was standard technology for getting copy from the field to the editor’s desk, to the use of “-30-” to mark the end of copy and the idea that an article in a daily paper should be literature, written, she says, 'like steel.'”