What does it mean to recognise and write about endings even as we live through them?
The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a seminar and discussion with Elisa Tamarkin, on her new book Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon (University of Chicago Press, 2026)
Elisa will discuss with us aspects of her remarkable book, about the last day of the Vietnam War and the last helicopter that evacuated civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy. Now, more than fifty years later, the book 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 the US ambassador and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and in photographs of the war’s end. The book is about the 1970s and its psychologies of denial and defeat, about “limited” wars that are also endless wars, and about the problem of how to raise consciousness of world events. In this discussion with her, we will reflect on all that ended in a day—and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.
Pre-readings to stimulate reflection and discussion for the session will be forwarded to those who register.
Elisa Tamarkin is the Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, of Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon (2026); her previous books are Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, all published by the University of Chicago Press. She is now working on a book on Melville's fascination with questions of visibility and consciousness in literature, art, and life. Tamarkin currently serves as Chair of the Berkeley English Department.
