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Interested in other author autographs or signatures? Go here.
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If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O'Brien (Author)
Ingram - A searing, intensely personal
account of O'Brien's experience as a Vietnam foot soldier that takes readers behind the infantryman's rifle--from the minefields of My Lai to the darkness of the ghostly tunnels--in a heartfelt
masterwork of its genre. Reissue. (Military/War History) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From the Publisher - Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave
us this searing, intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him -- to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My
Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and heartfelt, If I Die In A Combat Zone has been hailed
as a masterwork of art in its genre.
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Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (Author)
Book Description - "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like
calling Moby Dick a novel about whales."
So wrote The New York Times of Tim O'Brien's now classic novel of Vietnam. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, Going After Cacciato captures the
peculiar blend of horror and hallucinatory comedy that marked this strangest of wars. Reality and fantasy merge in this fictional account of one private's sudden decision to lay down his rifle and begin
a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. Will Cacciato make it all the way? Or will he be yet another casualty of a conflict that seems to have no end? In its memorable
evocation of men both fleeing and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle
in the hearts of us all.
"Simply put, the best novel written about the war. I do not know . . . any writer, journalist, or novelist who does not concede that position to O'Brien's Going After
Cacciato."
--Miami Herald
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The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (Author)
Amazon.com - "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 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
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