Excellent Writing and Storytelling. A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

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	• The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien Broadway, 1998 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 686 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent Writing and Storytelling. A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Tim O'Brien's invokes in the reader a feeling of deeply understanding the war experiences of Vietnam War soldiers. His writing is amazing. This will stand the test of time.

A Warrior's Classic

The Things They Carried seems more of a memoir than fiction, but I'll have to take Tim O'Brien's word for it. The book is used in college classrooms today, despite fading generational interest in Vietnam. Why? Because it's neither a polemic nor a glorification of the warrior's dilemmas within the fog of war. O'Brien lays details out there and you make of them what you will. That's the true test of a classic, and of a warrior's integrity. In my mind, this book is both - a warrior's classic.

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Hypnotic!

Here is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Reads like a tough memoir but also like excellent literary fiction, and shares many a profound insight about war, courage, human nature, truth, trust, friendship, and a hundred other deep topics.

What makes this all the more interesting is the variety of stories O'Brien tells, some read like Chekovian sketches, others like the best of Andre Dubus in a grittier setting. My favorite, How to Tell a True War Story, explores the ironies and absurdities of war in so many ways -- how war changes the combat soldier, how it creates deprivation and desire, how it is both unspeakably ugly and yet beautiful to behold at the same time. Only someone who has been there and experienced these things can write with the authority O'Brien displays here.

This should be required reading in high schools and colleges across the land. Ten stars!

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Evoking the essence of the Viet Nam war experience

My daughter and I recently traveled to Hanoi and I came home wanting to know more about the Viet Nam war experience, which was core to my college years (1964-1968). Tim O'Brien captures the bravado, sweetness, fear, friendship, cruelty and horror that permeated that experience for our young men serving there. This is a must read for those in my generation who are still trying to understand the meaning of that long and desperate war that tore our country apart.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.

With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.

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