Inspired by his real experiences as a young soldier in the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien’s widely acclaimed 1990 book “The Things They Carried” is an engrossing collection of stories about the varied experiences of war, from its violent horrors to heart-wrenching moments of friendship, sacrifice, and beauty. O’Brien’s writing is equal parts hallucinatory and concrete, surreal and corporeal, as the novel’s chapters vary in time period and perspective, to fully explore the futility of war, the power of friendship, and the motivating effect of death, shame, morality, isolation, and survival. “Part of the job of the writer is to be an iconoclast,” says O’Brien, and to tell the public the things it may not want to hear. 

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