Word: emerson
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Julius Caesar. Brando and the I--dahs of March. At Emerson Hall 105, on Friday and at the Mather House Dining Hall on Saturday, both days...
WINNEPS AND LOSERS is a book for those Americans, like the CIA agent, who have tried to forget. When Emerson first visited Saigon in 1956, when Vietnam was still a French colony, the streets were quiet, lined with trees and women in silk and parasols. When she returned there in 1970, Saigon had become a city of refugees and prostitutes catering to the American army. Vietnam needs no reminders of the American experience in Indochina. But America, apparently, does, and the detailed portraits of individuals Emerson gives us are far more moving than statistics could be. It is the small...
...Emerson is struggling against something deeper than other people's forgetfulness, however. She is herself trapped by her inability to move beyond the war, and at points in Winners and Losers her tone becomes a little holier-than-thou when she writes of her own anguish. The book is an effort to exorcise her own memories, as well as an effort to jog those of other people; to this extent, Wills's comment is a fair one. But the book she has written is not, as Wills suggests, ineffectual protest; it is a powerful reminder of the agony caused...
Winners and Losers is not perfect, of course. At times the detail grows tedious and redundant, at times Emerson's fervor obscures the gray areas in between those who have lost and those who have won by the war. She makes no effort to analyze the causes of the war in Vietnam; that is not her mission. Her goal is that of a reporter, to describe what has happened, and she makes little attempt to move beyond that limited role. In some ways that omission is unfortunate: the reader is left curious about the meaning of Emerson's experience about...
...Perhaps Emerson's final point in Winners and Losers is that very few winners at all emerged from the war in Indochina. One of the veterans she talks to suggests that if there are any, they certainly aren't the people who fought on either side in Vietnam. And for everyone else, it is easier to forget the war ever happened than it is to worry about veterans' rights or about amnesty for draft resisters or people with less than honorable discharges or about reparation payments to Vietnam. In a time when America seems to be trying hard to leave...