The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
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Book Reviews of The Things They Carried
Book Review: kaylie carmons hott review!!
Summary: 3 Stars
Tim O'Brien, begins by describing an event that occurred in the middle of his Vietnam experience. "The Things They Carried" catalogs the variety of things his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company brought on their missions.Throughout the collection, the same characters reappear in various stories. The first member of the Alpha Company to die is Ted Lavender, a "grunt," or low-ranking soldier, who deals with his anxiety about the war by taking tranquilizers and smoking marijuana. Lavender is shot in the head on his way back from going to the bathroom, and his superior, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, blames himself for the tragedy. Cross is distracting himself with thoughts of Martha, a college crush, but she doesnt feel the same way abouthim.In "On the Rainy River," the narrator, O'Brien, explains the series of events that led him to Vietnam in the first place. He receives his draft notice in June of 1968, and his feelings of confusion drive him north to the Canadian border, which he contemplates crossing so that he will not be forced to fight in a war in which he doesn't believe. Sitting in a rowboat with the proprietor of the Tip Top Lodge, where he stays, O'Brien decides that his guilt about avoiding the war and fear of disappointing his family are more important than his political convictions. He soon leaves, going first back home to Worthington, Minnesota and later to Vietnam. In addition to Ted Lavender, a few other members of the Alpha Company are killed during their mission overseas, including Curt Lemon, who is killed when using a grenade to play catch with the medic, Rat Kiley. . Lee Strunk, another member of the company, dies from injuries he sustains by stepping on a landmine.In the last story, "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brien gives another twist to his contention that stories have the power to save people. In the stories of Curt Lemon and Kiowa, O'Brien explains that his imagination allowed him to grapple successfully with his guilt and confusion over the death of his fourth-grade first love, LindaIn the last story, "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brien gives another twist to his contention that stories have the power to save people. In the stories of Curt Lemon and Kiowa, O'Brien explains that his imagination allowed him to grapple successfully with his guilt and confusion over the death of his fourth-grade first love, Linda.
as you can see this story takes place at the war in viet nam.
Book Review: What is Truth without knowing what it is?
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Things They Carried" is a superb collection of stories by Tim O'Brien. He takes what actually happened to him in Vietnam and amplifies each story with fiction to better get across his experience in Vietnam to the reader. At first I was disappointed at learning that none of what happened in the book actually happened in real life. As the book flew by I realized that by expanding the truth he could create a closer resemblance to the emotions that he felt and so make the book more meaningful to those who were not there. The diversity of the stories causes a surge of emotions as a person reads through. One will make a person laugh and the next will cause compassion to reach to new depts. A story that continues to stand out in my mind is story from the others is the story of one man's disappointment at not being able to save a friend from drowning in a pile of sewage in a rice paddy. Not all of the stories in the book are about creating emotion some are about what could happen to the boys over in Vietnam. What the boys, and I say boys because of the average age being nineteen, experienced could have been a positive or negative affect on them. A negative effect being to bring out the brutality in some like Agar or in others refine their virtues like a purification process. The book being just over two hundred pages allowed me to personally cruise through the book in a single two and half hour reading session. During which I chose to ignore my videogames and continue reading, which is fairly hard for me to do. The overall excitement rating is not very high about a medium, but the situations and the emotions are the strength. The one major weakness of this book I believe is due to the lack of coherency between the stories. He seems to want to cover much more than what he actually wrote about and so inserted as much as he could by shortening the chapters. Over all it only has only a slight negative effect. What is in the shorter chapters though some times has more meaning than that of some longer ones. O' Brien ultimately tries get the reader to feel compassion for what the true soldiers did go through for this is why I think the book is written along with him finding a way to cope with the fighting he saw. As a complete work it is a stunning book, given its strength not by violence, but by the underlying truth interwoven in the stories that gives it actual influential power.Book Review: Great Book
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first bought this book I decided to flip through it, maybe read the first few pages to get a feel for O'Brien's style and narrative. I ended up reading the first two chapters, and finished the book in just a few days. I chose to read this not because I have any interest in the Vietnam war, but for exactly the opposite reason. I don't know very much about it, which is likely due to the United State's indifference to this `conflict' as it was often called. I'm not generally a big fan of war fiction, or war movies, but there is a certain intensity, a blood and guts reality. These soldiers were without the technology we have today, without `bio weapons', without heat seeking missiles. O'Brien held my attention in his stories of how he and his platoon passed the hours with practical jokes, stories of home, and of course the preoccupation of death as one thinks of the life they are taking to spare their own.There's a section in the chapter entitled "On the Rainy River" where the author describes what he did during the final months the summer before going off to Vietnam. He had the unfortunate job of working in a meat packing plant, and describes the job with such visceral detail that one can completely understand and even sympathize with his need to run from this awful job. He writes of trying to scrub the smell and grime from his body and clothing. It's entirely repulsive and brilliant.
Though I enjoyed this, and tore thorough it I believe O'Brien gives away too much at times. He writes about writing entirely too much and it distracted me from the stories by pulling me closer to the author. He explains his constructions and takes away some of the mystery and magic of his creation. In one story he writes of how he brought his daughter, Kathleen, to Vietnam many years later so that she might see where her father had been and understand that period of his life. But then O'Brien explains that he doesn't have a daughter, Kathleen, that he took on a trip to Vietnam. There's a recurring `just because it didn't happen doesn't mean that it's any less untrue', and although this idea is original and I understand the concept I believe it was utilized too much and he returns to it excessively. I wasn't so interested in knowing about "How to tell a war story" as I was about reading them.
But brilliant nonetheless. I'll likely read another O'Brien novel
Book Review: Stories Can Save Us
Summary: 5 Stars
I consider a great piece of literature so whenever I find my eyes have glazed over and started to merely move over the written words while I ruminate on something I read on the last page.
Shell shock, Post-traumatic-stress syndrome. It has many names. Few have dealt with it like Tim O'Brien. He wrote a brave and engaging account of some of the darkest moments of war and human existence. He, if not profligated, then at least summoned the fortitude to confront the fears that, no doubt, dominated his life for years.
The Things They Carried is a compilation of stories of the experiences of the members of the Alpha Company Living and Fighting In the Vietnam War. O'brien writes not a reticent word in the novel. He writes a good portion of the book as a personal narrative but writes also, from the point of view of others. Reading the stories, told in chronological quagmire, I couldn't help but feel an intense desire to see what was going on in O'Brien's mind.
His is a nebulous method of storytelling. He embarks on several short journeys with the reader to show the truth in war, life, and love, at times seeming discursive, and sometimes also inexplicably sagacious. He never goes far with a central theme, preferring instead to put forth bits and pieces of his company's experiences and leaving a good deal up to the reader. Instead of bending over backwards to paint a picture for the reader, O'Brien hands the reader a fistful of jigsaw pieces that, may not make a complete picture at all because, for him, the book is more a cathartic volition from the horrors of war than a former soldiers recollection of heroics.
As I read "On the Rainy River", a chapter of Tim O'brien's war novel, The Things They Carried, I had just such a moment as I mentioned earlier. I felt as if O'brien told me the story of his struggle with his own ideals and the pressure pushed upon him by those he loved, he showed me a river on which he rowed. He rowed away from his home and from what he thought were his troubles. But his own beliefs felt the lassitude of his guilt and he couldn't finish rowing across the river to Canada. At that moment my own mind went errant into a review of O'Brien's. Sitting there, book open, I found myself pondering the more ethereal regions of my own conscience.
Book Review: A great book on war and on living after it is over
Summary: 5 Stars
I read the title story of "The Things They Carried" in college and thought it was one of the best stories I'd ever read. It wasn't until a month or so later that I learned it was a book-length work and one day when I was killing time in the library I tracked it down, found an empty carrel, and stared reading.Four hours and a missed dinner later I finished the book and sat there for a long time trying to take it all in. These stories-- and it is difficult to say which are stories, which are memories, and whether there is a distinction between the two-- are so sad and funny and disturbing that I was exhausted when I finished. But the next day I went out and bought my own copy of the book and I've re-read it maybe twenty times. It's a book I always recommend when someone asks me if I've read anything good lately. It's been 10 years and this book is still one of the first that leaps to mind.
O'Brien creates a surreal world of men at war and the time that exists before and after war. The characters (who may or may not be O'Brien and the men he served with) fight and play and kill and die with no real sense that there is an outside order trying to impose its will. There are things to be carried and hills to be climbed and missions to be accomplished and there is no firm beginning or end to it. The war never ends, because the stories about it go on.
And that is perhaps the other big theme of the book. These stories are not just about war, but about how stories can themselves create a reality as real as the one we walk around in. O'Brien alternately tells us that the stories we are reading are true, that they really happened, and then later admits that he made it all up. Writing fiction is, after all, the skillful and entertaining telling of lies. But then O'Brien tells us that these "stories" are often more truthful than the cold hard facts. This isn't presented in a pretentious, oracular way, but it the words of a man trying to understand just what happened to him and people he cared about.
I don't know how good a job I've done in conveying how great this book is, so let me just say that if you read this book, you won't be disappointed in the least bit. When you finished you'll be right back here recommending it to someone else.