Rating: 
Summary: All That They Carried
Review: They carried weapons and good-luck charms. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Tim O'Brien writes from memory and tells the stories of ten U.S. soldiers in the Alpha Company fighting in Vietnam. This novel is written in the third person allowing an overview of the Vietnam War. He shows the emotions that these 10 young men were feeling. Some of the troubles that they went through and that troop moral was almost always low. They killed and died because they were embarrassed not to. Some shot themselves to get of the being in combat, walking from village not winning or losing anything. He describes a pointless boring war. It wad very descriptive and interesting book. I would recommend it to anyone. but don't be queezy there are some graphic parts.
Rating: 
Summary: I wish it were true!
Review: Tim O'Brien wrote this novel in a way to get the reader to understand what the troop went through and to feel what they felt. O'Brien and his men, his "family", were over in Vietnam and experienced many life changing events together. He didn't tell the reader what really happened, he wrote about what seemed to have happened. The truth of the stories isn't in the story itself, it's in the emotion captured from the story. Story truth is different than real truth in that sense. O'Brien even at times admits that he made up a few things in order to get his point across. Nevertheless, his story has significance. The added details are only further proof of the over all truth. O'Brien distorts the truth between fact and fiction. The result is that it is impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories truly happened to O'Brien and his men. O'Brien's aim in combining fact and fiction is to make the point that the intended truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story. O'Brien is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but instead to explore the ways that speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. He wanted to convey the truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. I would have like to have had the stories be true. They seemed so real and the details completely drew me in to believe that it was true. The detail just went on and on for pages it was amazing to think how it could not really be true. I sometimes felt I was right there with them because the stories and details were so vivid. It makes me wonder what really happened out there. This book is a great way to get an inside info to an aspect of life so many do not get to experience. Reading from a history book about the war doesn't do hardly any justice to real life in the action stories and descriptions, even though these stories are fabricated to his liking. What I thought could turn into a chore to undertake turned into one of the quickest reads that I've ever had with a new author. His writing style worked well for me. There was so much detail that I understood everything he was saying and could picture it all. This book was recommended to me and I highly recommend it to others.
Rating:
Summary: The Things They Carried
Review: It's impossible to sum up all of the ways in which this book distinguishes itself as an inexorable part of the cannon of Vietnam War Literature. O'Brien uses the composite form of the novel to evoke feelings and create connections between Vietnam and America, the past and the present. All the while, O'Brien plays with the literary convetions of truth in storytelling.The strength of this book lies in its ability to evoke strong feelings in the reader. The reader feels the pit of fear in his or her stomach, the heat of the jungle, the pain of memories, and the confusion that comes from dealing with the inability to comprehend the destructive nature of combat. The aspect of the book that is most critical to me, and I think the most often overlooked is the metaphysical connection that O'Brien draws between combat and the art of writing truthfully. In each "war story" there are connotations and directions on how one goes about creating literary truth. As an English Lit major, this was the most interesting part for me. Even without the complexities, this book would be a masterpiece. It is rife with authentic feelings (whether or not they are factually true), and the reader easily gets caught up in the stories and lives of Alpha Company. If you only read one work on Vietnam, this should be it!
Rating:
Summary: What did they carry?
Review: I was assigned this book for my history class, and because I normally don't enjoy assigned reading, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this book was wonderful. Once I got into it, I had a hard time putting it down.. and I had finished it after three days. A painfully honest book, O'Brien tells you about the war in an interesting and unique perspective. You can never be sure if what he writes is what happened, because as he said, the truth is less believed then the lie. Some stories might have been part of his imagination, others personal experience or told to him by a friend. Whether or not it was the reality, I was there the whole time, and I didn't want to leave. This was a book I wasn't happy to finish, and I'm looking forward to getting other books by Tim O'Brien.
Rating:
Summary: A Book to Carry Around
Review: Just as Pi, in "Life of Pi", needed fiction to survive a shipwreck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it turns out you need fiction to survive a war, too. How about this thesis: we need fiction to live, period. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is an important book that matters. It matters for the techniques used to tell stories; it matters to understand cruelties of war; and it matters to understand human integrity. At first I was puzzled whether this book was fiction or not. How could I not? Characters in the book referred to the main character, or the narrator, as Tim O'Brien. But then O'Brien flatly denies at times of a previous paragraph to be factual. And then writes something that, he says, is non-fiction. I agree with O'Brien. Words maybe different between fiction and non-fiction, but emotions remain the same. Only that fiction impressively amplifies those very same emotions. Another use of fiction maybe to fill in gaps of what you remember. Nothing is wrong with that. Also, O'Brien can avoid any lawsuit should he get in trouble for using real names, because, after all, this is a work of fiction. O'Brien parlays the stories in a non-chronological order. This is nothing new in story telling, but O'Brien does a careful job and purposefully so. For instance, when we leave his buddy Kiowa with blood bubbling where his head should have been, he reappears later in the book in a previous time. But because I liked Kiowa, and because I hated to see him die, I appreciated to see him once again before I finished the book. Thank you, O'Brien. Well done. Perhaps the most poignant character in O'Brien's story is that of Mary Anne. She is a gorgeous girl and a bit naïve at first, leading me to believe she maybe an airhead. From images of frolicking with her boyfriend to a serious greenie is a remarkable transformation of character. Once the transformation was complete, she confides in her boyfriend, who wants her to leave Vietnam: "You just don't know...I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country-the dirt, the death-I just want to eat it and have it there inside me." It's not that she wants to stay and fight that intrigued, it's the way she talked about what had now become her passion.
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Summary: "Lemon tree, so pret-ty..."
Review: When my teacher assigned this book in high school, I looked at the cover and the back, and an image formed in my mind of a bearded man with an acoustic guitar strumming on it and signing: '-down by the riverside, aint gonna study war no more.' I'm suspicious of any fiction which is based on the direct experience of the author. Too often I've found that it makes objectivty impossible; sometimes, writing what you don't know makes for a more interesting perspective. This book, though, proved to be outstanding. To illustrate why I think so, take this anecdote: Two soldiers in the narrator's battalion are playing 'catch' with a smoke grenade. One of them, stepping back to intercept a long pass, steps on a land mine. His name is Kurt Lemon. Later, when another soldier is retrieving pieces of his body from the branches of a tree, the narrator overhears him humming 'Lemon Tree.' What O'Brien recongizes about war is its strangeness which defies most attempts at relation - it's grotesque and horrible, but also, like any real situation, sometimes engaging and even funny. This isn't to say that O'Brien glosses over the horrors of war; the book is extremely graphic and disturbing at times, but as he says at one point, describing the way that tracer shots look cutting through the dark: 'Your brain hates it, but your eyes love it.' What emerges is a competley immersive and sometimes overwhelming war experience, raw and organic, something like a thriller in its command of the reader's attention. What it never becomes is diatribe. It isn't even always a direct narration, either. 'Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong' is a surreal parable, and in 'The Man I Killed,' O'Brien experiments with narrative detachment and contrasts the importance of real truth with 'story truth.' While some stories show outright violence, many, like 'Night Life,' disturb more subtly be evoking the creepy general atmosphere of the war. The final story puts the book in a new perspective, making it something intensely personal. 'The Things They Carried' is an achievement in every way; as 'war literature,' as literature in general, as a good read and as autobiography. Incredible.
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Summary: Thoughts on "The things they carried" by Tim O'Brien
Review: This novel captures the horror and heroism brought on through the Vietnam war. O'Brien's theory on bravery encapsulates the Vietnam war, encouraging soldiers to give of themselves to gain. "Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital..." This novel is written in third person, allowing an overview of the Vietnam war. This causes the reader to get different perspectives about the war, therefore creating their own opinion.
Shame is also a big part of this book because bravery is held in high regard. The soldiers were young and afraid, but could not turn back because of fear they would be ridiculed and not fight for their country.
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Summary: I feel like I've been to war
Review: I missed being a soldier in Viet Nam by an accident of birth, I was born female. My male classmates in college and law school were shipped off or found ways to avoid the draft. Some went to Canada and one, someone I recently met, went to prison. Had I been a male I'm sure that I would have thought I had to do my duty. So never having gone to war it's hard to imagine how it would really be. Tim O'Brien brings it home in THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. I listened to the audio version and the narrator was excellent. Had I attempted to book, I'm not sure that I would have made it through. Listening to the recording is a moving experience. I've always wanted to go to Viet Nam. After listening to the tape I'm more convinced than ever that I want to go. I want to experience the country. Certainly it will never be like it was for the men who went there during the war. As a single black woman of 59 I often think that the husband that I should have married lost his life in Viet Nam. The war killed of a generation of black men, both physically and mentally. A guy that I used to date is still alive but he lost his soul there. Listening to this tape made me understand the Viet Nam experience in a heart wrenching manner.
Rating:
Summary: Realism of War
Review: This book was very intersesting. It is hard to label it a novel due to it having twenty two short stories. The author (Tim O'Brien) does a good job of tieing the stories together and not letting them run to long or short. The first story in the book is a little hard to follow at first until you start to understand what he he is talking about.The book is very good at showing detail and giving the mental image of how life was in the war. I would recomend this book to anyone who likes and is interested in war stories.
Rating:
Summary: A Protest of War
Review: The thing they carried is a collection of short stories that almost come together to form a novel. The author (Tim O'Brien) Makes you fight to memorize these short stories, and ties them into the other pieces in the book. O'Brien is very descriptive on the short stories and lets you get involved with the solders of Vietnam. He shows the emotion that these guys went through, and how the troop morale was always low. Some guys shoot themselves in the foot just to get out of being in combat, and walking village to village without winning anything. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes war stories, or anyone looking for a book with emotions and action.
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