About this Item
Fine in a Near Fine dustjacket. Black boards quarterbound in black cloth. Both the spine and the front panel are stamped in gilt. Octavo. Red endpapers. 273pps. First edition, first printing. An excellent, collector's-quality copy: clean, tight, square, and bright. All tips are sharp. The textblock is immaculate; no reading wear and no previous ownership markings. The dustjacket, glossy in a new mylar sleeve, is mildly rubbed with a couple of crinkles. As is common with the dustjacket, the light-sensitive red ink of the spine-panel is slightly faded. The original price (19.95) is intact. "Depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves." Purchase with confidence: all books, gradings, and descriptions are rendered the care of a genuine bibliophile. Satisfaction guaranteed or all costs you've incurred will be promptly refunded. Thanks for your interest in Nooks Of Books. Seller Inventory # 208-5310
Bibliographic Details
Title: The Things They Carried
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, Boston
Publication Date: 1990
Binding: Hard Cover
Edition: First Edition
About this title
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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