Rating: 
Summary: One of the finest English language books ever written.
Review: This may be a series of personal and emotional accounts to O'Brien, but because of his writing style and the impact the Vietnam Conflict had on both him and everyone else in the Vietnam era, the reader can't help but ultimatley feel as if they are walking behind O'Brien in formation, seeing everything he sees and going everywhere he goes. No book has ever captured that elusive truth of what it was like in such startling fashion as The Things They Carried. No book has ever captured the effect it had on those involved years after it happened as The Things They Carried. If this were made into a motion picture, I feel it would be superior to the most similar Platoon. His style is beautiful and effective and in the end it delivers a satisfying read. I can honestly say that of all the books I have ever read, this is the only book of all of those that I hated to see end.
Rating:
Summary: Puppies and Claymores
Review: It is not a novel or biography, rather a series of interconnected tales, some autobiographical and some fictional, about the members of an infantry platoon before, during, and after the war in Vietnam. These stories have the sense of universal truth and considerable emotional power. "The Things They Carried" is not about a hero who conquers the enemy, but about ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances. O'Brien uses the cumulative effect of these stories is to show the reader the inhumanity of war and how it affects the men who are made to fight it. He wants us to feel what it is like to be drafted, to fight, and to come back from an unpopular war. And, finally, he wants us to feel what it is like to write about war. His semi-autobiographical story, "On the Rainy River" is poignant as he tells of the emotional turmoil and moral dilemmas that Tim O'Brien faced after he received his draft notice, walked off his job and drove toward the Canadian border. "It was a kind of schizophrenia. A moral split. I couldn't make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my whole life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure". O'Brien blends diverse voices and events into an unforgettable portrayal of war and the people who fight it. He mingles fact with fiction, tells and retells events from different points of view; the book is as much about war as it is about the difference between truth and reality. In "The Man I Killed", O'Brien tells of the enemy he killed with a grenade. He lingers over the body, describing it and its wounds, and imagined the life the man had before the war came. Oddly it echoes Tim's. "He had been taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege. He accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail. He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on his mat, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of his stories. He hoped in his heart that he would never be tested. He hoped that the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always, even when he was asleep." O'Brien's stories have a surreal, dreamlike quality that blends truth and fiction. The imagery is magnificent, the descriptions masterful. In "The Ghost Soldiers" he explains Vietnam: "The countryside itself seemed spooky - shadows and tunnels and incense burning in the dark. The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science. Late at night, on guard, it seemed that all Vietnam was alive and shimmering - odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogiemen in sandals, spirits dancing in old pagodas. It was ghost country, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at night. How you never really saw him, just though you did. Almost magical - appearing, disappearing. He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass. He could levitate. He could fly. He could pass through barbed wire and melt away like ice and creep up on you without sound or footsteps. He was scary". This is a war book, filled with soldier's language; it is earthy and sometimes obscene. It is also fast-paced, and at times, a little gruesome. In "Spin" he tells of an adopted puppy that was stolen by another soldier, tied to a claymore anti-personnel mine, and then exploded. In some ways the soldiers were like that innocent puppy, unaware of their fate and powerless to change it. "In many cases a true war story cannot be believed," he writes. "If you believe it, be skeptical. It's a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredibly craziness." In ''How to Tell a True War Story'' O'Brien gives the reader a different perspective of the difference between fact and fiction, and truth and lies. He advises that it is necessary to use fiction to describe fact. Many of his stories did not actually happen, but they could have. "It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil". The last story in the book, "The Lives of the Dead" is captivating, heart wrenching and achingly beautiful. This story really shows off his talent. "It's now 1990. I'm forty-three years old, which would've seemed impossible to a fourth grader, and yet when I look at photographs of myself as I was in 1956, I realize that in the important ways I haven't changed at all. I was Timmy then; now I'm Tim. But the essence remains the same. I'm not fooled by the baggy pants or the crew cut or the happy smile ¾ I know my own eyes ¾ and there is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now. Inside the body or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging". O'Brien does an amazing job of pulling you into this book. I found myself at turns, angry, disgusted, and saddened. By telling these stories, O'Brien evokes the same emotions in the reader that O'Brien felt when he went to Vietnam. O'Brien hates war, and after you read this book, you understand him, and perhaps other Vietnam veterans.
Rating:
Summary: I loved it!
Review: Imagine you are an eighteen year old boy who was sent to fight a war that you don't understand and don't want to happen. The war was Vietnam and Tim O'Brien was one of the many young men who were faced with this situation. He describes his thoughts and feelings during the war in his outstanding book The Things They Carried. The book remarkably depicts the brutality of the Vietnam War and the lives of its soldiers. Each of the stories in this book create vivid images of the tropical jungle and the men of Alpha Company. O'Brien wrote it as a collection of short fictional stories based on his experiences during the war. Throughout the book O'Brien writes about the nature of a true war story. He says, "A true war story is never moral. If a story seems moral, do not believe it." This story, which is one of my favorites, is just like that. Bob (Rat) Kiley and Curt Lemon were two guys in O'Brien's company. They would toss a purple smoke bomb back and forth until it exploded and covered one of them with its purple powder. The company was on a short break when Curt tossed an active smoke bomb at Rat. Rat tossed it back and just as Curt stepped into the sunlight to catch it, he stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round. The explosion blew him into a tree and killed him. Rat was devastated, he had just lost a man equal to a brother to him. About two hours later the company came across a lost baby water buffalo near an abandoned village. Rat volunteered to feed it, but when it wouldn't eat, Rat's temper snapped. He opened fire on it, he shot it in the knee, then in the mouth. He shot it about eight times before he started to cry. He couldn't deal with the war anymore and he took it out on the innocent buffalo. I enjoyed the book because the fictitious stories, like this one, seemed so real. Tim O'Brien makes it fell like your in the war and you know the characters. I loved Tim O'Brien's book The Things They Carried because he is so good at making the reader feel like they are witnessing the entire war first hand. I would recommend this book to anybody, especially if they like war stories. It is one of the best fiction book I've read and certainly the best war story I've ever read.
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Summary: The Power -- and Pain -- of Memory
Review: This is one of the most powerful collections of short stories I have ever read, and I've read quite a few! I keep going back to it time and again, for the imagery, the characters, the deep emotional impact of the stories. Tim O'Brien has fashioned a collection of stories that, while each can stand on its own, work together to form an entire work of fiction which expresses the strength of memory and the healing that comes with working through the most painful of those memories. The setting is, of course, the Vietnam war, but, like all good fiction, the stories are about much more than war. Human drama, played out in a hellish environment, reveals much about man's strengths, weaknesses, and emotions. As Tim O'Brien says, there are no morals here, nor should there be. Life has many gray areas, and when we see only the black and white, we can only become lost and confused. In struggling to survive, the men of Alpha Company find what is really important in their lives. Death is a powerful force, but so is love and loyalty. Powerful and disturbing, this is a beautiful work, one I highly recommend. I think it is already a classic, and deservedly so.
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Summary: The things they carried.... LITERALLY.
Review: I actually counted the frequency of the word "carried", and the word in it's other tenses. By page 20 it was used 94 times! And I didn't count synonyms like "humped" or "took". I think by page 17 it began to be used figuratively (oooooh). I didn't start out reading this book with this in mind, but I quickly became annoyed by its overuse and thus triteness. Maybe that was the idea, to habituate me to the word so as not to care about "the things they carried". Well it worked. It worked so well I never finished the book.
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Summary: The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction
Review: One of the things that speaks most to the mastery of Tim O'Brien is the blurring of fiction and nonfiction and the meshing of novel, memoir, and short story. The fact is, this is a work of fiction, but if you hadn't known that before you read the book, you would never have figured it out. And as for what type of fiction the book is, it is a collection of short stories with the realism of a memoir and the force of a novel. The Things They Carried is the story of the men of Alpha Company and their struggles with the enemy. This isn't a book about bullet-whizzing combat, but rather a story of the experience of battling the idea of the enemy in Vietnam. O'Brien explains the nature of truth in and of the stories from the war. Once you read this, you will understand better the randomness of the stories. The randomness is certainly not a fault of the book, but rather a tool to involve your emotions in a different way. As Rick Bass of The Dallas Morning News put it, "In a world filled too often with numbness, or shifting values, these stories shine in a strange and opposite direction, moving against the flow, illuminating life's wonder"
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Summary: A true war story
Review: Tim O'Brien writes: "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it." I think this applies not only to war stories, but to all stories, and I think that is why this book works. Whether this is someone's reality or not is not important. It gets you in this unspeakable way, and you just say wow after you are done with it. I didn't want to read this book when it was assigned. I was tired of the idea of the Vietnam War and what an utter mess it was. And I wasn't even born until two years after we got out of there. But, this book is about more than war. It is about life and love and memory and truth and death and hate and forgetting and fiction. It is everything. And it is so beautifully written. If you read this book, you will learn something about what words can do, you will learn something about why people do the things they do, you will learn something about the war, you will learn something about yourself. It is a truly wonderful book. I have read it over and over and found so much in it. I would say it is one of the best and most powerful books I have ever read, and I would say that Tim O'Brien is one of the greatest living writers, one of the greatest writers ever, even. Tim O' Brien writes: "And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." That is what The Things They Carry is. A true (war) story.
Rating:
Summary: I thought is was excellent and well written
Review: Tim O'Brien is masters of puting words on paper. I read this book when I was junior in high school. It taught me that life isn't always as you expect it to be. People have to face ordeals they don't always want to face. By facing them it brings meaning to their lives
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Summary: A beautiful, haunting, and very personal 'Nam story
Review: I wasn't alive for Vietnam. But this book makes it real to me. Whether or not Tim O'Brien was in combat (I like to think he was, but it says in the title that it's a work of fiction), he writes a very poignant and beautiful recollection of war. It's a story of young men in combat, carrying everything from rabbit feet, to photographs, to their own emotions. It's written in little vignettes, jumping around a bit, but not missing the point. It's the kind of book that can be enjoyed by an 80 year old man or a 15 year old girl. It sends the same message to everyone. Don't miss this wonderful book for the world! You'll be so happy you didn't.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating!
Review: This book, while titled a work of fiction, captured me from the very beginning as it felt so real. It was so descriptive and so well written that I found it hard to believe that it is fiction. Everything reminded me of what my brother and his buddies told me about their horrific experiences in 'Nam. Tim O'Brien has written an extraordinary novel and I would highly recommend this. I really loved it -- much more than I ever expected. I was sure you will enjoy it, too.
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