The Things They Carried

(Paperback)

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Description

The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
The Things They Carried is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.

But while Vietnam is central to The Things They Carried, it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart about the terrible weight of those things we carry through our lives.

Reviews

One of the best war books of this century, an unflinching attempt to illuminate both its obscene physical brutality and the terrible mental overload Guardian

A thrilling and beautiful distillation of everything that has been thought, felt, or said about the Vietnam War and its long afterburn. A heartbreaking and healing masterpiece; time will make it a classic Michael Herr, author of Dispatches

EssentialOBrien captures the wars pulsating rhythms and nerve-racking dangersa stunning performance. The overall effect of these original tales is devastating New York Times

Author Bio

Tim OBrien was born in Minnesota and served as a foot soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, and after graduate studies at Harvard worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. When If I Die in a Combat Zone was published in 1973, it established him as one of the leading American writers of his generation, a status that was confirmed when Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award for fiction.