Customer Comments

It took me nearly two months to have the mental and emotional power to pick up another book after reading The Things They Carried. I tried. I even tried over and over to read other Tim O'Brien books. But I was overcome by the poetry, the grandeur, the skill, the power of this book. I didn't want to read anything else. It penetrated deeply into a place in my spirit. For a while I worried I'd never read another book again. I didn't go to Vietnam. I wasn't even alive at the time. Many people have written on the subject. Movies have been made. None of them have made me really understand what happened there. I'm sure my knowledge of what happened is still minute. But Mr. O'Brien made me feel. The emotion in his stories touched me deeply. They moved me. I'd say this book even changed me. It's a wonder and a tragedy that human beings pass through the things they do. Tim O'Brien helped me feel for a couple hundred pages the humor, the pain, the guilt, the agony, the shame of Vietnam. The stories weave together to create one singing piece of beautiful and painful poetry. It's gorgeous. This is very high on my list of best books I've ever read.

Does anyone write books like this anymore? There's more creative energy in that one little story than thousands upon thousands of books piled together. Beautifully written, wonderfully translated by Robert Pinsky. I read this book twice, along with listening to it on audiotape. I'll go back to it again and again throughout my life. One day I'll read it in Italian. The punishments handed down to the sinners are so creative and repugnant. I started imagining myself suffering those punishments, eternally. There's some real brutality in it. A special book.