Word: emerson
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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...
...those interviews, tucked in among her recollections of the American presence in Vietnam, when Emerson describes a meeting with a North Vietnamese diplomat in Paris, or a Vietnamese soldier, that form the most moving parts of the book. These people, and others like Don Luce, the American reporter who revealed the existence of Saigon's tiger cages, or an American deserter on his way to Sweden, struggled to bring an end to the war. They are the heroes in a book dominated by sadder characters, American veterans and their families whose lives have been destroyed by death or mutilation...
Throughout the book, Emerson is driven by a missionary's fury at the thought that Americans have done their best to forget Vietnam and to relegate to the status of a mistake a war that lasted more than a decade, cost more than a million civilian South Vietnamese lives, generated more than ten million South Vietnamese refugees, left the Vietnamese countryside pockmarked with craters, and cost the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. A former CIA agent Emerson knew in Vietnam who lives now in New York told her, "It bores me, it's ancient history," adding, as he turned...