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The Things They Carried
- Narrated by: Bryan Cranston
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
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Editorial reviews
Publisher's summary
This modern classic and New York Times best seller was a finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and has become a staple of American classrooms. Hailed by The New York Times as "a marvel of storytelling", The Things They Carried’s portrayal of the boots-on-the-ground experience of soldiers in the Vietnam War is a landmark in war writing. Now, three-time Emmy Award winner Bryan Cranston, star of the hit TV series Breaking Bad, delivers an electrifying performance that walks the book’s hallucinatory line between reality and fiction and highlights the emotional power of the spoken word.
The soldiers in this collection of stories carried M-16 rifles, M-60 machine guns, and M-79 grenade launchers. They carried plastic explosives, hand grenades, flak jackets, and landmines. But they also carried letters from home, illustrated Bibles, and pictures of their loved ones. Some of them carried extra food or comic books or drugs. Every man carried what he needed to survive, and those who did carried their shattering stories away from the jungle and back to a nation that would never understand.
This audiobook also includes an exclusive recording “The Vietnam in Me,” a recount of the author’s trip back to Vietnam in 1994, revisiting his experience there as a soldier 25 years before, read by Tim O’Brien himself.
The Things They Carried was produced by Audible Studios in partnership with Playtone, the celebrated film and television production company founded by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and producer of the award-winning series Band of Brothers, John Adams, and The Pacific, as well as the HBO movie Game Change.
For more from Audible and Playtone, click here.
Critic reviews
Featured Article: The Best Short Story Audiobooks to Immerse Yourself In Now
Short stories have had a huge impact on the canon of great literature. In fact, some of history's most revered novelists—Ernest Hemingway, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Louisa May Alcott among them—wrote short stories, which make excellent introductions to their work. Plus, these bite-size listens are the perfect way to get a big dose of literary inspiration even when you’re short on time. To get you started, we’ve compiled a list of listens.
Editor's Pick
Bryan Cranston is probably a sorcerer
"You don’t even have to be into war stories to get swept up in the witchy magic of Tim O’Brien’s classic about the Vietnam War. He himself served in the army after being drafted as a young, promising college grad. His Vietnam stories are semi-autobiographical, tender like a bruise, and—in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut—filled with razor-sharp reflections about humanity’s beauties and ills. The best part? It’s brilliantly narrated by Bryan Cranston. It’s probably impossible to listen to this one without getting chills."
—Rachel S., Audible Editor
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
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By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Bullet in the Brain
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- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
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Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....
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The Perfect Example
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By: Tobias Wolff
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The Deep Blue Good-By
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He's a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He's also a knight errant who's wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is simple: he'll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half.
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Before the A-Team, there was Travis McGee
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Zombies: More Recent Dead
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- Length: 20 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.
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A well blended mix
- By The Lone Mopper on 07-30-15
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Sometimes a Great Notion
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- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
- By Jerry on 12-06-14
By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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Vampires in the Lemon Grove
- Stories
- By: Karen Russell
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In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" find Russell veering into more sinister territory.
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Stylish modern magic realism
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Stories
- All-New Tales
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Christophe has been in the New World only a year when his native guides abandon him to flee their Iroquois pursuers. A Huron warrior and elder named Bird soon takes him prisoner, along with a young Iroquois girl, Snow Falls, whose family he has just killed, and holds them captive in his massive village. Champlain's Iron People have only recently begun trading with the Huron, who mistrust them as well as this Crow who has now trespassed onto their land; and her people, of course, have become the Huron's greatest enemy.
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Thoughtful and interesting, if not always gripping
- By David on 06-15-14
By: Joseph Boyden
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Eat the Apple
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A gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir which explores toxic masculinity and the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged 18, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.
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Annoying and smug
- By Charlie on 01-03-19
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Gone
- Gone Series, Book 1
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In the blink of an eye, everyone disappears. Gone. Except for the young. There are teens, but not one single adult. Just as suddenly, there are no phones, no Internet, no television. No way to get help. And no way to figure out what's happened. Hunger threatens. Bullies rule. A sinister creature lurks. Animals are mutating. And the teens themselves are changing, developing new talents - unimaginable, dangerous, deadly powers - that grow stronger by the day. It's a terrifying new world.
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Please rerelease this book w new narration
- By Kim on 02-12-17
By: Michael Grant
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Jungle of Bones
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Dylan Barstow has finally crossed the line. After getting caught on a late-night joyride in a stolen car, Dylan is shipped off to live with his ex-Marine uncle for the summer. But Uncle Todd has bigger plans for Dylan than push-ups and early-morning jogs. Deep in the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea, there's a WWII fighter plane named SECOND ACE that's been lost for years, a plane that Dylan's own grandfather barely escaped from with his life. In all this time, no one has ever been able to track down SECOND ACE - but now Dylan and his uncle are going to try.
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Excellent book!
- By t4ester on 10-02-17
By: Ben Mikaelsen
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What listeners say about The Things They Carried
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mel
- 10-28-13
Heavy Load
Like voices from the grave, devastatingly profound, and haunting. A review would be inappropriate, but my experience with this book was probably similar to other readers that were very young teens during the height of the Viet Nam war. Though I wore one of those MIA bracelets, sent neighbors and friend's older brothers off, went to Country Joe and the Fish concerts and yelled out the FISH cheer, I was young, distant, and naïve, and could only marginally intellectualize the atrocities and the nightly tally of deaths. Listening to Cranston narrate these stories gives faces to the words; the soldiers become flesh and blood -- not just characters and chapters. Their candid stories and Cranston's seriously brilliant interpretations were so achingly real that I could not listen long without pausing, or just stopping my device for a breather. (It took me 2 weeks to get through this.) This would be a much easier read, but hardly better; Cranston is able to convey the emotion, every chuckle, every hope, every pain, every horror. It's not always the obvious that is difficult to hear; the slaughter of the water buffalo wasn't half as savage as the fundamental experience that nurtured the attack... it's listening to the innocence and promise in these young soldiers as it ebbs away. It's looking back through the all-seeing eyes of retrospection and time, and probably also adding *mother* to the list of sister, daughter, girlfriend, neighbor. A vivid reminder of the fragility of life and the true cost of war. Like others have mentioned, there are several books concerning wars that give you that *boots-on-the-ground* feel, but this one, especially as it is performed here, is the emotional experience--to the degree that it can be shared.
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- charles watkins
- 08-07-16
Unrealistic
I spent 1970 in Vietnam in an infantry platoon, mostly in the jungle. We were among the first American troops to enter Cambodia when Nixon invaded that country. I'm finding it very frustrating listening to The Things They Carried. Most of the stories are not believable and certainly are not consistent with my experience. An infantry grunt somehow manages to have his 17 year old girlfriend from Cleveland Heights come to Nam and spend weeks with him on a firebase? Really!? That could never happen in anything that I experienced in the Army or in Vietnam. And, then she, in about 10 days, becomes this ghostly apparition going out on night patrols with Green Berets and shortly thereafter decides to go off and live alone in the jungles of Vietnam? I saw and experienced some horrifying things in Nam, but most of what I'm reading in this book just has very little resemblance to the realty of what the Vietnam war was for me. Maybe that is only a problem for me and not other listeners, but I cannot recommend this book.
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- Darwin8u
- 10-16-13
Grief, terror, love, longing
These are just the intangibles that O'Brien packs into 'The Things They Carried'. There is something about Tim O'Brien's second (after 'Going After Cacciato') war masterpiece that just gets me. It is one of my favorite [I know, I know favorite isn't the right word and if I had more time, I'd figure out a better term] war novels ever. I love how O'Briend both masters and subverts the form. I love how he bends the reader through time and space. How O'Brien messes with the idea of what a true war story really is. This novel, along with 'Dispatches' by Kerr and 'Matterhorn' by Marlantes, infuses the Vietnam War with its own mass, a specific gravity and real tangible gravity. These fictional stories seem almost to be as true as any nonfiction books written about the War.
While I haven't been to war, both my brothers and a brother-in-law that have come back from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the burdens they all returned with seem to reflect in this novel.
Finally, I'm not sure how they hooked Bryan Cranston for this narration, but it might just be my favorite narration EVER. Sir Anthony Hopkins nailed it when he wrote a note to Cranston about 'Breaking Bad':
___
That kind of work/artistry is rare, and when, once in a while, it occurs, as in this epic work, it restores confidence.
You and all the cast are the best actors I’ve ever seen.
That may sound like a good lung full of smoke blowing. But it is not. It’s almost midnight out here in Malibu, and I felt compelled to write this email.
Congratulations and my deepest respect. You are truly a great, great actor
___
Let me just add to and mimic the great Sir Anthony Hopkins. You Bryan are the best narrator I've ever HEARD.
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- Jefferson
- 12-31-13
"Vietnam Was Partly Love"
The Things They Carried (1990) is a powerful audiobook, perfectly read by Bryan Cranston, and written with searing and sensitive honesty by Tim O'Brien. The book contains twenty-two Vietnam war stories based on O'Brien's experiences and those of his fellow soldiers during his one-year tour of duty in 1969. The pieces combine to vividly evoke what it was like before, during, and after the Vietnam War. And it's not only a Vietnam War book; it also explores universal questions of memory, imagination, language, reality, story, war, and love. For O'Brien, Vietnam becomes at times a metaphor for the world, and a state of mind as much as a physical place.
The title story introduces the war and the American men who fought in it by listing and explaining what they carried: war gear (helmets, boots, bandages, weaponry, etc.), practical things (canteens, c-rations, toilet paper, bug repellent, etc.), personal things (comic books, condoms, dope, photos, letters, basketballs, etc.), unpleasant things (infections, diseases, lice, molds, etc.), intangible things (fear, guilt, longing, grief, memories, etc.), and Vietnam itself (soil, sky, monsoons, etc.). They carried it all without any "sense of strategy or mission" or hope, moving by inertia. Through the lists O'Brien weaves the desperate fantasy love of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross for Martha, an unresponsive girl he dated once in college.
"Love" depicts Jimmy Cross' visit to O'Brien some years after the war, when the subject of his love, Martha, came up in conversation.
The third story, "Spin," concerns how memory makes the war now, while story makes it forever.
"The Rainy River" examines what to O'Brien was a colossal failure of conscience and nerve, his choice not to flee to Canada to avoid Vietnam: "I was a coward. I went to the war."
"Enemies" shows how the enemy is not always the guy fighting for the other country.
"Friends" ironically develops the situation between two enemies in the previous story.
"How to Tell a True War Story" anatomizes war, memory, fiction, and reality. "If you feel uplifted in the end [of a war story], if there is any rectitude, you've been made a victim of a years old and terrible lie."
"The Dentist" is a vignette about a bully's fear of dentists.
"Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" depicts the seductive call of nighttime jungle patrols to the soul of a 17-year-old girl visiting her boyfriend soldier: "I feel close to my own body. I'm glowing in the dark. I know exactly who I am. I couldn't feel that anywhere else."
"Stockings" proves the talismanic protective power of pantyhose.
"Church" is a quiet story in which the platoon occupies a pagoda, monks cleaning machine guns and soldiers talking about religion.
In "The Man I Killed" O'Brien describes a young VC soldier he killed, delicate body and smooth complexion, black pajama pants, blown out of his rubber sandals, one eye staring open, the other a star-shaped wound, his jaw knocked into his throat, his hopes and fears and goals and wife.
In "Ambush" O'Brien tells how he killed the man, and when his daughter asks him, "Have you have killed a man?" he says "No," but is still seeing "the young man step out of the fog."
In "Style" O'Brien depicts a callous soldier mocking the graceful dance of a Vietnamese girl before her burnt house and killed family.
After the war in "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker is at a loss at home, driving round and round his small town's prairie lake, houses, and 4th of July park, imagining telling the story of how he failed to get the silver medal for uncommon bravery.
"Notes" explains the "true" story behind "Speaking of Courage," revealing in a "slip" that it was O'Brien who failed to win that medal by failing to prevent his buddy from sinking into a field of excrement and mud during an appalling mortar barrage.
In "In the Field," the platoon searches that muck for the corpse of their fellow-soldier as O'Brien (?) tries to come to terms with his role in his friend's death.
In "Good Form" O'Brien says that apart from his having done a tour of duty in Vietnam, everything is invented. He didn't kill that young man but, having been present, he might as well have killed him. Story vs. truth. Or the truth of story.
20 years later in "Field Trip," visiting that same muck field with his 10-year-old daughter, he goes for a cleansing swim in it.
In "Ghost Soldiers" O'Brien deals with his second wounding injury and his vengeful hatred for the rookie medic who nearly killed him by mistreating him.
In "Night Life" a fellow soldier bugs out from the stress of high alert nights.
In the last story, "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brien interweaves his sad memories of Linda, a girl he loved as a boy ("Why do you think I'm dead?") with his memories of death during his tour of duty.
After The Things They Carried, an hour-long "bonus featurette" written and read by O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me," (1994), closes the audiobook. This non-fiction piece depicts his return in 1994 to Vietnam with his lover, Kate, revisiting places of terrible carnage from his tour of duty and speaking with local people and trying to deal with his nightmarish memories, vivid nightmares, and love for Kate. I found this non-fiction piece more moving than The Things They Carried. I had felt that occasionally in his stories he is at times too consciously telling stories, both in his comments about the nature of memory, story, and truth, and in his talent for crafting perfect tales. That coupled with Bryan Cranston's stellar professional reading made for a moving and harrowing experience that at times felt crafted, acted, and story-like. By contrast, O'Brien's craggy, tenor voice is the voice of a plain, sensitive, and damaged person reading his failures, survivals, and losses, along with the self-delusional nature of America's mythology of righteous innocence. The burning truth of "The Vietnam in Me" as read by O'Brien scorches the stories.
Finally, O'Brien, who may feel like a coward to have gone to war, exercises intense bravery in his honest fictional autobiographies.
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- Madeleine
- 10-20-13
Terrible, Wonderful Voluptuous Realism
I first read this book long ago. When the audio version was released, I decided to revisit it. My initial reading made me feel this was an extraordinary collection of stories written with a kind of driven brilliance, an awful, playful bitter precision. Tim O'Brien is a master of descriptive writing. A reader would have to have serious cognitive deficits not to get pulled in and inundated in the stories. It wasn't until I listened to the audio version, narrated flawlessly by Bryan Cranston, that I noticed the voluptuous poetry of his language.
The book is an anthology of stories about the Vietnam War. Bound together by the theme of what is carried, it opens with the very literal list of what the men in his platoon carried and broadens out into the emotional scars, the guilt, the sense of loss, fear, unrequited love, of brotherhood and of the deadly numbness that is carried on the soul.
I was immensely grateful to encounter this book again.
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- David
- 08-10-16
For all vets and those too young
The Things They Carried is technically a novel, but it's really more of a fictionalized memoir, in which author Tim O'Brien creates a fictitious Alpha Company very much like the Alpha Company he served in, and a fictitious author named Tim O'Brien, who twenty years later is a writer writing about Viet Nam.
Now considered one of the "definitive" Viet Nam war novels, this book did not have the effect on me that it might on someone of O'Brien's generation. I was a child when the Viet Nam war ended, barely old enough to register that a war over there was anything of significance. I lost no family members in Viet Nam; I have no close friends who served there. By the time I came of age, Viet Nam preoccupied the media on which I grew up, but it was a foreign place and a foreign experience.
Tim O'Brien's semi-autobiographical novel is full of anecdotes, small stories, and harrowing episodes, but it's war on a small scale. Some of his buddies die, and others go nuts, but most just try to struggle their way through their tour and survive. They see action but not a lot of epic battles, just the constant threat of being shot at in jungles and drawing lots to see who will crawl into a Viet Cong tunnel with a flashlight in one hand and a combat knife in their teeth.
There is not much humor, but you wouldn't expect a Viet Nam novel to be funny, would you? (M*A*S*H*, famously, was really "about" Viet Nam but since it was still too recent and raw, they had to set it back in the Korean War instead.)
It gives some insight into what Viet Nam was like on the ground, but now, going on five decades later, Viet Nam has been explored and trodden and, if not exorcised from our national psyche, made bearable and confrontable again. And the Vietnamese, desperate to get in on the global market and its bounty of modern technology and foreign currency, no longer hold a grudge against us. They run tours through villages and war memorials. They greet American vets coming back to confront the place they once shed blood in almost like returning alumni.
As a wargamer, I have an academic interest in war. My particular area of interest is World War II, a war so long ago now that there are an ever-dwindling number of men and women who remember it first-hand, and which has faded into the fog of history and national mythology. Viet Nam, I think, is getting there. You can find Viet Nam wargames now, a thing that might upset living Nam vets but which would probably have been unthinkable in the years immediately after the war ended. Listening to Tim O'Brien talk about his ("his") war experiences did not sound very different to me than similar books narrated by World War II vets - equally horrible but equally distant, even though technically Viet Nam is within my living memory.
I appreciated this book, but I'm in that middle generation, too young to have had the real Viet Nam leave a mark on me, too old to find much here I haven't heard before.
The afterword by the author was a bonus in the audiobook, but probably what I found most profound of any of his stories was his meditation on why he went to Viet Nam. When his draft number came up, like many men of that era he contemplated the way he might get out of going, and even set out on that fabled trek to Canada. The story of his abortive flight, and his decision to return home and shoulder his responsibilities - literally - may ring more true for many of his generation than the ones who did end up dodging the draft, or who volunteered, or who were traumatized or killed. He went to Viet Nam because he couldn't stand the thought of letting down his family, his nation, of being seen as a coward. So ironically, as he puts it, he went to Viet Nam because he was a coward.
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- B.J.
- 10-21-13
Raw and brilliant ... perfectly narrated
Before I can say anything about this book, I have to comment on the narration. It is so perfect that it becomes one with the book. It was startling at the end to actually hear the real Tim O'Brien. Cranston became him in the book.
O'Brien's writing can be raw. It's apparent how deeply personal the Viet Nam war was for him - and I'm sure many others. Though perhaps not physically wounded, the emotional wounds are deep. I can't imagine how painful it's been for O'Brien to write about this time again and again. I admire his ability to be so honest about the emotional damage, the fear, and the heartbreak.
It's probably because of that approach that I can even listen to this. When other books approach war from the events and atrocities, it's just too much. The way O'Brien writes, the horrid things that happen are described in a way that it helps me understand the emotional toll paid by a generation of young men.
This is, without a question, one of the most important books about the Viet Nam war and its personal impact. Don't miss it.
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- Debbie
- 12-04-14
Raw, Haunting, Ruthlessly Open Account
Vietnam described in ways you never expect . . . my husband (a retired SGM) and I listened to this on a road trip recently . . . at times we laughed, totally familiar with the military terms, at other times we were totally silent . . . no words . . . absolutely NO words to describe what we were feeling . . . this is not the patriotic, hero stories of comrades at war . . . it's the down in the crap (literally), sinking into despair, wondering what the hell you are there for, tale of soldiers trying to make it one day at a time in a war that nobody wanted to fight . . . it's truthful and hard to swallow . . . it's honest beyond anything I've ever heard on Vietnam . . . no matter what your politics, you need to hear it . . .
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- Mike Ingram
- 11-02-13
A visit to Guilt Land
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
If the author didn't characterize Americans as being murderers and fools.
Would you ever listen to anything by Tim O'Brien again?
No.
What does Bryan Cranston bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Clear, concise reading of the story.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Sadness and disappointment.
Any additional comments?
The author makes it very clear that he believes America's part in the Vietnam war was immoral, evil and just plain wrong. He interleaves real events he witnessed with his recalled dreams of guilt and shame. The book is a pessimistic condemnation of the U.S. Military in Vietnam.
In the author's comments at the end of this book the My Lai massacre is presented (in the author's own voice) as being representative of America, not the horrible crime of a few. It's a common technique for anti-war authors to elaborate on My Lai and exonerate our enemies crimes, while avoiding giving America credit for doing anything right. He does not mention the horrors resulting from the Communist victory, the reeducation camps, the refuges who fled our enemy. He is only sad that he fought them.
This book is a heartfelt, tightly guarded emotional diatribe against America in Vietnam.
Depressing!
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- Ron
- 10-17-13
More then a War Story.
Tim O'Brien does more then tell a story here. He is able to give you the feeling of being there in both the descriptive nature of his words and the emotions it conjurers within. I got the sense of how heavy and traumatic some of situations were. I do have to warn you, if you are looking for a romanticized version of war this is not the book for you. All of the questionable/disturbing actions of some of the soldiers to acts of heroism are on full display. At times the graphic nature can be disturbing. O'Brien begins this journey when he receives his draft notice, continues on thru the war and concludes his story a few decades after the war.
Bryan Cranston brings these characters to life. He truly does justice to Tim O'Brien's work with his ability to fully emerge you into this world. You will feel all the burdens, decisions, losses, and triumphs. Cranston’s performance is everything you would expect from an actor of his caliber.
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