Word: emerson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GLORIA EMERSON'S Winners and Losers has not, on the whole, received very good reviews. Amost without exception, critics have said that her book--a collection of interviews and reminiscences about the war in Indochina--is confused, poorly written, and above all too personal. A Saigon correspondent for The New York Times from 1970 to 1972, Emerson drops any pretense to objectivity in Winners and Losers, concentrating instead on how the war affected her and other individuals. As a result, the critics have generally agreed with Garry Wills, who wrote disapprovingly in The New York Review of Books that...
Early in the book, Emerson quotes Nguyen Ngoc Luong, her Vietnamese interpreter, who wrote to her after she left, "There is an acute lack of forgetfulness in you about Vietnam." Much later in the book, she responds: "Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know...
...these lessons, painful and ineradicable, that Emerson tries to transmit in Winners and Losers. Her approach is typical of a reporter: she spent years interviewing dozens of Vietnam veterans and their families, dozens of antiwar workers, members of the foreign policy establishment that supported the war, and as many Vietnamese as she could. Her book has been criticized bacause the majority of the people she describes are American, but Emerson explains early on that she, like so many other foreign correspondents, found it difficult to contact North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese freedom fighters. And since the liberation of Saigon, very...
...American life, their many-colored pallet congeals into a brown blob. Particularly offensive are the overheated but not well done comments on sex change operations, the welfare system, and rugged individualism. In one scene, Jane's father refuses to lend money because he worships an icon of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the promoter of self-reliance. Here, the humor is too forced to be incisive or even amusing...
...Luis Tiant--all unintelligible delights. David Levi as Sonya Vabitsche looks like a very funny lab sample of Venereal Disease germs and David Merrill as Ophelia Heartbeat is a knockout. The rest of the cast works well, too. But an extension of this paragraph must go to Japes Emerson, who plays Cardinal Cynne. Leering with the shifty paranoia of a male Jane Curtin, Emerson moves, under his clerical robes and Rasputin beard, with a pneumatic grace and, except for a deficient malevolent laugh, his voice is the silky articulator of a deft cartoon of nastiness. When, after Emerson and Levi...