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intereact!Tim O'Brien
Retail Price (not our price): $14.95
ISBN: 0767902890
ISBN-13: 9780767902892
Publication Date: 1998-12-29
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Editorial Reviews (supplied by Amazon.com):
1) Product Description
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.2) Amazon.com
"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
Customer Reviews (supplied by Amazon.com):
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
1) The Reason America is Doomed [Rating: 2 out of 5]
There were a few insightfull stories in this tome. But, this book is written by a real liberal. In his eyes there is no winning. There is only digging one hole to be filled by digging another. Tim O'Brien is a wimp, part of the wussification of America. There is no black or white just ambiguity. This explains why this book is used so much by colleges and universities (liberal educators). In effect this book says "I am so smart that I can't actually kill the man that wants and WILL kill me. I can look though the enemy's eyes and I am the enemy." What a lot of drivel. When America and the rest of the Western World is taken over by Islam his descendents and mine will bow reverently toward Mecca.2) Unexpectedly amazing [Rating: 5 out of 5]
This was such a good book!! My college professor was the editor which is honestly the only way I would have ever come across this because he had us read it for class. I loved it. It was so real and easy to get attached to the characters, as if you were reading about friends. Definitely worth trying out if you don't typically read something of this genre.3) Best piece of fiction I've read in a very long time [Rating: 5 out of 5]
More than just a war novel, it's a study of the individual and of humanity. While the line between fiction and the author's experiences and that between fantasy and reality is often blurred, O'Brien's writing style is amazing.4) I appreciate what O'Brien was trying to do. [Rating: 2 out of 5]
That being said, the book still disappointed me with its total lack of subtlety and redundancy. I found myself skipping through entire paragraphs because I had read them before in previous stories, and I was irritated by the constant, exhuasted refrain, "I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now..." O'Brien is very clear on the point that, with a true war story, morality and truth are not necessary. I appreciate this, and I give him credit for the fact that his book echoes his own definition of the Vietnam War itself - vague, ambivalent, undefined, and without clarity or consistency. This, I feel he does fairly effectively, but for the fact that he repeatedly reminds the reader that that is his purpose. However, the inconsistency of the book, and the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the stories, made it difficult to follow at times, and overall it felt very sloppily written and constructed.5) Excellent Writing and Storytelling. A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize [Rating: 5 out of 5]
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.