Charles Trueheart: DIPLOMATS AT WAR and Alice McDermott: ABSOLUTION (with Robert Ruby)
In this one-of-a-kind evening, The Ivy is delighted to bring together two writers with recent books, in different genres, about Americans on the peripheries of war in Vietnam: children and wives of American servicemen.
In his memoir, Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict , Charles Trueheart threads his boyhood family experiences through the heart of a dramatic episode of Cold War power politics whose denouement hastened America’s ten-year military involvement in Southeast Asia.
Alice McDermott’s latest novel Absolution gives a riveting account from the perspectives of the wives of American servicemen, as they discover how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
Robert Ruby, former foreign editor of The Baltimore Sun, will moderate this conversation.
The Ivy is beyond pleased to present this excellent panel for what’s sure to be an insightful evening of conversation.
Charles Trueheart is a former foreign correspondent of the Washington Post, a former Associate Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and a former Director of the American Library in Paris.
Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2017. Her seventh novel, Someone, 2013, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and The Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Someone was also long-listed for the National Book Award. Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 and was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award. That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal and elsewhere. She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the Carington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature. In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.
Robert Ruby is a former European correspondent, Middle Eastern correspondent and then foreign editor of The Baltimore Sun. He later served as an executive at human rights organizations in New York and Washington. He is the author of Jericho: Dreams, Ruins, Phantoms and Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England’s Arctic Colony.
