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The Things They Carried |  | Author: Tim O'Brien
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $7.42
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Rating:  786 reviews
Sales Rank: 6473
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0618706410
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780618706419
ASIN: 0618706410
Publication Date: October 13, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780618706419 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Amazon.com Review
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to." A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber
Product Description
Tim O'Brien's modern classic that reset our understanding of fiction, nonfiction, and the way they can work together, as well as our understanding of the Vietnam war and its consequences, The Things They Carried now has well over a million copies in print.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 786
 A masterpiece of the first rank March 13, 2010
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
For some reason I had never gotten around to reading THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. I've known about it, of course, for fifteen or so years and have long intended on reading it someday. I think most readers keep "The List" of all the books they fully intend to read at some point. For instance, I intend to read Thomas Mann's BUDDENBROOKS and Stendahl's THE RED AND THE BLACK, but you can't get to everything at once. But seeing this as an option in the Vine Program was sufficient to make the difference between reading it and not reading it.
What a great book! In a way, the stories reminded me of the Jimmie Rodgers's line from "Frankie and Johnny": "This story has no moral." O'Brien doesn't try to draw any grand conclusions about war in general or Vietnam in particular. Instead, he tries in these interconnected and intertwined stories to stay honest to the experiences that he and his friends had in Vietnam. The stories he tells cross and crisscross with one another so that we continually re-encounter the major characters in slightly different contexts. O'Brien sketches each of the members of Alpha Company in exceptional detail, in ways that we get to the hearts of them as individuals. We don't learn everything about Kiowa or Azar or Lt. Cross or Rat Kiley, but we feel like we learn the most important things.
I love the hybridity of the book. It is technically a collection of short stories, but the way they connect up to one another has the effect of a novel. It is a work of fiction, but it is clearly deeply rooted in O'Brien's own experiences, so that it at times feels like a memoir. The language is couched in prose, but at times with a delicacy and precision that it almost becomes prose poetry.
I regret that I put off reading this book for so long. It is one of those books that not only deserves to be read but reread. It has now moved from the list of books that I want to read to the list of books taht I want to reread.
 Powerful, moving book March 12, 2010
BermudaOnion (South Carolina)
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a collection of loosely related short stories. I'm not a big fan of short stories, because they often feel disjointed to me, but it works really well in this instance. The disjointedness is what I imagine soldiers feel when they're facing battle so far from home, so it made me feel closer to the characters.
As always in a collection like this, some stories affected me more than others. My favorites were:
* The Things They Carried - This is the first story in the book and it details what the soldiers carried in the field; from the equipment necessary to survive to the small, personal items that they can't live without.
* Field Trip - In this story a soldier who survived the Vietnam War returns with his ten year old daughter and attempts to explain the war and his part in it to her.
* Speaking of Courage - When a soldier returns to his hometown, he has trouble adjusting, in spite of the support of his family.
* The Lives of the Dead - 30 years after the war, a soldier tries to come to term with deaths from his childhood and from the war.
The Things They Carried is a very moving book and as I read it, I wondered why the world can't find a way to end wars. This is the kind of book that it's almost hard to say that I enjoyed - I think maybe saying it affected me is probably more accurate. This is a powerful book that moved me immensely. I want to leave you with one passage that really struck me:
"He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important."
Classic! March 5, 2010
kim*designer (Pittsburgh, PA area)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This fabulous interwoven short story collection needs no Vine reviews to recommend it, because it has already established itself in the Western literary canon. Tim O'Brien is probably the greatest storyteller of his generation. His evocation of pathos, amusement, awe and horror in the reader is sometimes almost miraculous. His stories of Vietnam move beyond the war story genre and become stories of life itself, in all its joy and ugliness. O'Brien's stories will give you a "lit hangover" - meaning that you will be thinking of them long, long after closing the book, and pieces of them will come back to you when you least expect it. No wonder this book is highly recommended on most "must read" lists, and is an AP English Lit selection in many classrooms.
Defines the Vietnam Conflict February 25, 2010
Kris (Texas)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a teenager, I was forced to read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I was more interested in other things at the time, slogged my way through it, and passed the test. Now, many years later and hearing from others that this is a must read, I decided to give it another go. Only this time, I was left with a much more lasting and meaningful impression. First of all, O'Brien has a gift. The descriptions, the breathtaking prose...I haven't the words to express how exquisite these are. Let's just say that the Vietnam War movies don't do what this book does; There are simply not enough special effects! Our narrator, O'Brien, tells his story and that of Alpha Company's. Interwoven are themes of guilt, redemption, patriotism, loyalty, and love. I have not been to war, but one can imagine that the experience would be similar to the one O'Brien details. The book is not a single narrative, but rather a collection of stories, and this is what makes this book really work for me. Also, O'Brien isn't a hero in the traditional sense. He is a man whose fear of failure drives him. Again, this too feels authentic to me.
So forget the psychedelic films, forget the anthems and folk songs- The Things They Carried is where an understanding of this era can be truly found.
Fantastic book!!! February 25, 2010
Jeffrey Brostrom (California)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
My husband ordered this book on his Kindle and loved it. I ended up purchasing a Kindle for myself and decided to read this book too. I loved it!!! It seems like each word is perfectly chosen . . . he's an awesome writer.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 786
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