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Summary: Inside the soldier's soul
Review: This book is not a war story although it is full of stories about the Vietnam war. It is not about the cause, it is not about the battles, it is not about survival. It is a search of one man's soul to try and make sense of the things he saw, the things he felt and the things he heard during the war. It is clear that Tim O'Brien still carries things, still lifts his load, bears his burdens, and that he doesn't know how to put it down. This book is a search for what happened as well as why. He still remembers but now isn't sure if what he remembers was real or was what he needs it to be in order to cope.
His writing is so precise that I experienced in some small way his dreams, his struggles and the surrealness of that piece of his life that still haunts him. This novel expresses this torment better than any other I have read on war. It is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand those who endured this war.
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Summary: Simply put--the book is brilliant
Review: It is an understatement to call The Things They Carried one of the best books about Vietnam, though it is certainly that. But it is also simply one of the best books written period and well-deserving of its many accolades. A collection of interrelated stories centered on the narrator's experience both during the war as a soldier and after the war as a writer who seemingly can't not write about the war, the book is searing in its emotions and brilliant in its style and structure.
The narrator and author share the same name and in fact some of the same attributes if one bothers to look up the author. It is, however, as the narrator is at pains to say, a work of fiction. Some people may be bothered by the blurring of reality and fiction as it occurs in the work, but I found it emotionally and intellectually stimulating. Some may also be put off by the non-linear structure, as the book begins mid-war and veers back and forth in time all the way back to fifth grade (and yes there is a connection to the war stories), to O'brien's reception of the draft notice, to O'brien struggling with memories of the war and telling stories of the war 20 years later. By telling the story "out of order", O'brien forces the reader to make the connections themselves--they may be imagistic, thematic, or character-driven, but there are always connections. It also adds a bitter poignancy to be reading a story involving one of the men in the group whom you already know via an earlier story is not going to make it out of the war. The characters therefore don't simply act in the stories, sometimes they literally haunt them, enhancing the emotional impact.
Throughout O'brien interrupts the Vietnam story to give the "writing" story--How to Tell a True War Story for instance is part Vietnam-experience, part how-to manual, part recollection of a public reading. Good Form is an explanation of why the narrator chooses to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction and frustrated though one may be, it's hard not to see his point.
The book is rife with metaphor, symbol, simile, poetic language, use of syntax/punctuation to convey feeling and meaning-all the tricks of the stylistic trade turned to such brilliant use that they do not feel like tricks at all. There is little flash here, just a passionate desire to tell a story, to get the reader to above all else feel, and so O'brien empties his toolbox in a wildly succesful attempt to do just that.
Almost any collection of stories fall prey to the "uneven" curse, where the great stories are balanced by the bad, the good by the mediocre. While not all these stories are at the same level, it is hard to pick out a weak one. One might think "Spin" since it's merely a series of vignettes. But the language and the imagery and the depth of meaning in these seemingly too-brief paragraphs belie that first instinct. Maybe the opening title story which lacks the first-person narrator and is broadly general in comparison, but the accretion of detail, the power of the images and brief characterizations based on what each group member carries disallows that one.
So if you can't pick out a poor story, which are the great ones? It's difficult to choose. My personal favorites includes Speaking of Courage for its evocation through imagery and detail and invented dialogue of how the war never really ends for some. And then Notes would have to follow since it continues Norman's story. How To Tell A True War Story for its beautifully terrifying depiction of friendship formed and ended along with its meta-fiction discussion of the writing process. Spin for the spare layered beauty of its imagery. But my overall favorite would have to be the closing story which not only ties the book's images, actions, and themes together but also broadens it beyond the war; it breaks out of the Vietnam prison and is both heart-breaking and beautifully optimistic.I have taught this work to high school students now for over ten years and every year it is the same. It is their favorite work. And several go out to buy their own copy to read on their own. When I read it aloud in class, it is dead silent--something anyone who has ever been in high school as a student or teacher knows is nearly unheard of. It would be difficult to find a book more rich, better crafted, more emotionally powerful than this one.
Rating: 
Summary: The Things They Misplaced
Review: On the back of this brilliant book, it says that soldiers carried many things with them to the battlefield, but to one like me, they carried the ignorance of the "fat man" behind the scenes all of this spiral of death. They seemed to carry things to the battlefield, but when they came back from the battlefield, I believe they left many things behind, including the lives of the soldiers that fought the Vietnam War, and for the people that weren't slaughtered, their sanity
The book teaches me a lesson, war is a spiral of death. Many people on both sides lose their lives. Hearing of your family member's death over a country that wishes to change the lifestyle of their land is really not worth fighting for as this book presents.
Hopefully after "The Things They Carried", your soul will be relieved of much anger and tenseness of today's current wars. So if you have the time and the money to look at the book, you would believe too that this book is worth the time and the patience.
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Summary: O'Brien enters the canon of American Literature
Review: Simply put, O'Brien has, with this and his other works, entered the canon of the great American literary writers. The Things They Carried is the masterwork of Vietnam War literature from the American perspective, with Michael Herr's Dispatches coming in at number two. It goes something like this: Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, James, London, Crane, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Salinger, the Beats, Lowell, Plath, Miller, Angelou, Pynchon, etc ... O'Brien.
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Summary: Modern classic
Review: As a junior in high school, I too read this book as a school assignment. Unfortunetly, the rest of my subjects suffered until I finished the novel two days later. The author's style is engrossing- he will literally force-feed an image into your mind, and it won't disappear. For writing style alone, it is definately worth the read. I'd say, in a contemporary vein, the use of surrealism is comparable to Marquez. The use of language- a blend of gritty slang and poetic symbolism- is entirely his own. One thing. Don't ever read O'Brien's books if you're expecting the facts laid out in front of you. This particular author has a striking way of painting an ambiguous line between truth and imagination, and he leaves it up to the reader to decide. If you read too much into it- expecting, for example, a collection of veteran's war stories- you are sadly misguided. O'Brien uses his powerful skills as a writer to take you to a place where soldiers treasure absurd good-luck charms, where animals are cruelly mutilated, where people are lost under a sea of mud. Is it true or not? That's not the issue. This book deals with the grating realities of what has been, would have been, might have been.
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Summary: For those who don't know...
Review: I've been reading some of the previous reviews and I'm pretty ticked off. These following comments is what I'm talking about.. "he freely admits that he didn't really kill anyone, and that he doesn't even have a daughter, and also that he didn't ever think about hopping the border to get away from the draft and that made me think that how much of the other stuff he said isn't real." "Also, every time O'Brien would say something interesting the next chapter he would come back and say it was not true." "he contidicted to many points as well as telling storys that in the end the reader couldn't tell if it was true or not." Along with other ones. People, you've GOT to read the WHOLE title, "The Things They Carried: A Work of FICTION" It says FICTION...meaning it's NOT true. Overall, this book is one of THE GREATEST books I've ever read. I loved it from the beginning to end. It's a MUST READ! =)
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Summary: Vietnam, from a grunt's perspective; writing from a writer's
Review: In an ever widening Gyre (with apologies to Robert Parker), Tim O'Brien begins with a description of the literal physical objects a platoon of ordinary foot soldiers carried with them as they slogged trough the rice paddies of Vietnam; moves onto the psychological description of the memories, attidudes, and beliefs from home that the soldiers carried with them in their minds and psyches; continues with the memories of the war that the soldiers carried home with them from Vietnam, and concludes with the burden a novelist carries of using fiction to describe a truth greater than non-fiction. This seemingly over burdened superstructure is carried on the back of an unconventional narrative which is balanced on the knife edge between a novel, a memoir, and a series of interconnected short stories. O'Brien's strength as a writer is that his narrative skill makes us want to turn page after page, just to find out what happens next to his characters, with no thought to the over arching structure the author is creating--even when he breaks the narrative to address the reader directly. A superb novel of Vietnam, human nature, and the nature of writing.
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Summary: Humping It
Review: The Things They Carried is a masterpiece of storytelling. Tim O'Brien understands how to capture the very essence of feeling. He does so in a way that gives the reader a sensual exploration into the lives and heads of the characters. This approach goes beyond the usual extent to which authors involve the reader and pulls and tugs the reader, heart and soul, into the book. Though his writing style is reminiscent of Hemingway, Tim O'Brien's approach to storytelling is different. Hemingway normally expected the reader to fill in necessary details and emotions about the characters, whereas O'Brien envelopes the reader with sensory clues about the inner feelings and external influences of the characters. It does not matter if the events in the story truly took place; O'Brien is simply giving the reader an overall sense of the emotional burdens and fears and concerns of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. Maybe Curt Lemon never stepped on a rigged mortar round, in the end it does not really matter because the threat was always there, and like a mental torture device it played with and rang out the minds of every young man in Vietnam. The threat was so visceral, so cut-to-the-heart, that when events like that really happened, it was as though it happened a million times before in the heads of each boy. Boys--that's what they were. Each one had his baggage to carry, not just the physical baggage carried upon their backs, but emotional baggage too. And while they could easily discard some of the weight off their shoulders during a day's worth of humping, there was no way to rid themselves of hearing the noises of Vietnamese music echoing in their ears, cries from children who were scorched by napalm, the gurgle of blood in the lungs of a VC boy of about twenty, or the dull click of a rigged mortar round; or of seeing the density of it all, the thick Vietnamese canopy, the thick monsoon fog, the vermilion-colored stains, the moss-green mud upon the face of a fallen comrade, or the sunlight upon the face of Curt Lemon as he was pulled into a tree in pieces; or of smelling the stench of blood and mud-soaked uniforms, excrement-laden fields, C-rations, jungle plants, stagnant water, monsoon rains, layers upon layers of insect repellent; or of tasting the lemony-stomach acid as it rises in your throat, the copper-tinged blood in your mouth, the acrid-fish-flavored manure field along the Song Tra Brong river; or of feeling the supple-leather combat boot as your buddy slipped below the surface of a muddy plain, the whithered pages of an oft-read illustrated New-Testament against your face as you dream, and the forty pounds of supplies, weapons, and keepsakes upon your back--forty friggin' pounds! You feel it all--experience it all. It was these things that Tim O'Brien set out to do when he composed The Things They Carried, and he does them beautifully. What are human beings but the sum experiences that we perceive with our five senses? The way things "seem." Tim O'Brien captures what must have been like in Vietnam through his splendidly-crafted portrayal of these senses. It's this sensual journey into the thick of it all that makes Tim O'Brien's book a masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction
Review: Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" explores the personal journey of twelve young men in the same platoon during the Vietnam War. I have always been interested in the Vietnam War era, especially with the conflict surrounding it. The book contains twenty-two short stories, based on the lives of the twelve men in a platoon. The stories take place before, during, and after the war; they detail each man's battle between their wants, dreams, desires, fears, and of course the Viet-Cong. Tim O'Brien does an excellent job describing how each character's experience is different, even though they all go through the same situations. Tim O'Brien's main purpose is to tell a true war story, and "a true war story is never about war." The reading level for this book is college or upper-level high school. There are a lot of connections that have to be made to get the full effect the writing. Anyone who is interested in a good story that is well written should start reading this book, because after the first few pages the writing suck you in.
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Summary: best book ever
Review: to me it is vary hard for me to be impresed by reading books but when i took this in my hands and started to read this i could not belive how tim O'brien exspress his feelings in this book and how he tells in full detail about his travels and how he didn't want to go to war. Truely though this had to have been the best work of writeing i have ever seen.To me it is vary hard for me to be impressed by reading books but when I took this in my hands and started to read this i could not believe how Tim O'Brien express his feelings in this book and how he tells in full detail about his travels and how he didn't want to go to war. Truly though this had to have been the best work of writing I have ever seen.
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