Written by the 1979 National Book Award-winning author of Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Capturing the horror of Vietnam and the aftermath of war, each of the 22 tales relates the exploits and personalities of a fictional platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.
“…The Things They Carried is a powerful view of Vietnam—it is truly a terrific novel for students gaining [an] understanding of one man’s point of view.” --Professor Mary Borg, History, University of Northern Colorado
"The questions raised by attempting to identify genre, the narrator's comments about the nature of story-teling and of truth, and the varying versions of that truth illustrated in O'Brien's stories, make this book a perfect choice for examining post-modern characteristics. Besides all that, students love it." --Professor Dana P. Waters, Dodge City Community College
“The overall effect of these original tales is devastating.... Mr. O’Brien strives to get beyond literal descriptions of what these men went through and what they felt. He makes sense of the unreality of the war...by probing his memory of the terror and fearlessly confronting the way he has dealt with it as both soldier and fiction writer. In doing all this, he not only crystallizes the Vietnam experience for us, he exposes the nature of all war stories.... Mr. O’Brien cuts to the heart of writing about war. And by subjecting his memory and imagination to such harsh scrutiny, he seems to have reached a reconciliation, to have made his peace–or to have made up his peace.”–The New York Times Book Review
WINNER - YALSA Best Books for Young Adults
Readers Group Companion to The Things They Carried
A native of Worthington, Minnesota, Tim O'Brien graduated in 1968 from Macalester College in St. Paul. He served as a foot soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, after which he pursued graduate studies in Government at Harvard University, then later worked as a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post. He now lives in Massachusetts.
Other books by Tim O'Brien include If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, Going After Cacciato, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, and In the Lake of the Woods. Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979. In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the society of American Historians and was selected as the best novel of 1994 by Time magazine. His latest novel, Tomcat in Love (1998), is published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House.
