{"product_id":"things-they-carried","title":"Things They Carried","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief  terror  love  longing--these were intangibles  but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity  they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed  and died  because they were embarrassed not to.\" 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 OBriens 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 OBriens 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 OBrien 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 doesnt make it any less true. In \"On the Rainy River \" the character Tim OBrien 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 OBrien never drove north  never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim OBrien 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 both Tims went to a war they didnt believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim OBrien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality  fact and fiction  that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44966471041077,"sku":"ByrdShop_077106828X","price":127.15,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780771068287.jpg?v=1770563589","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/things-they-carried","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}