The Things They Carried

| 4.31 | 252,497 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Karl Marlantes, Caroline Paul, Eugene Gu, and 5 others. See all reviews

Ranked #1 in 16-Year-Old, Ranked #1 in Courage — see more rankings.

A classic, life-changing meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling, with more than two-million copies in print

Depicting the men of Alpha Company—Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three—the stories in The Things They Carried opened our eyes to the nature of war in a way we will never forget. It is taught everywhere, from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in... more
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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Things They Carried from the world's leading experts.

Karl Marlantes But when O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried he came down to absolute real brass tacks. It was no longer surreal, it was like here’s a list of what a grunt carries, an infantry soldier… (Source)

Caroline Paul A beautiful book by a writer who fought in Vietnam. (Source)

Eugene Gu @realDonaldTrump Tim O’Brien is the author of the book The Things They Carried, which was about the Vietnam War. Must be very triggering for Trump since he dodged the draft multiple times with fraudulent doctors’ notes for fake bone spurs like a coward. (Source)

R J Ellory It is a book about what it is like to be a regular ordinary American teenager and suddenly find yourself neck-deep in a jungle fighting a war that you neither understand nor care about. (Source)

Thom and Beth Atkinson The book is about the Vietnam War, but really it’s about how you remember trauma, and how you deal with it. (Source)

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