 |
 |
Sign in/joinLanguage: English [ others ]
Over forty million books on members' bookshelves.
|
Loading... The Things They Carried (Flamingo)by Tim O'Brien
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Although depressing (as war stories probably should be) it was an engrossing work. Although it's touted as fiction, I still was left wondering how much was actually fictitious and how much was just a slightly exaggerated truth. But that's the beauty of this work - O'Brien actually TELLS the reader that this isn't a true story, but it's absolutely true. He leaves you wondering and feeling uneasy and feeling a mix of different emotions, but none of those emotions are disappointment in his writing ability or boredom in reading the stories. (  )Sean191 | Jul 8, 2009 |   Is it an anthology or a novel, how much is true and how much is fiction ? Does it matter. Things they carried is a vignette of Vietnam, the casual brutality of soldiers and the gallows humour of war is unflinchingly exposed as are the after effects on the ordinary guys sent half way around the world for things they don't really understand. There are standout bits, to my mind "The sweetheart of song tra bong" being a particular high point. (  )anamuk | Jul 3, 2009 | I had to read this book in high school. I have no interest in war stories but I fell in love with this book. My copy is so ratty and loved. This book is fiction but reads like a memoir. In fact, a chunk of the book is devoted to the idea of truth: what is more true? A true story or a fictional story that creates the true feelings? ( )tianakai | May 21, 2009 | “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien does a great job of really showing us what young soldiers felt and thought while fighting in the Vietnam war. It starts off with Lt. Jimmy Cross and his men already in war, and details the items each one had to carry. They varied by mission and included everything from land mines to each other. O’Brien gives us an insight into the minds of the soldiers who put their lives on the line for our country in that very sad era. The book then jumps to stories of when O’Brien himself was in the war. He talks about missions he went on and the experiences he had. He reveals how he felt about the whole war. This is a very intriguing and insightful piece on a sad time in our history. Kip66 | Apr 29, 2009 | 1  This book is stunning. The writing is poetry. ( )dhogue | Apr 22, 2009 | 0.011 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0767902890, Paperback)"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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
