Featured Author: Tim O'Brien
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times

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Related Links

Jane Smiley Reviews 'Tomcat in Love' (September 20, 1998)

Michiko Kaktuani Reviews 'Tomcat in Love' (September 15, 1998)

Novelist Tim O'Brien Pursues 'Emotional Truth' (September 2, 1998)

In This Feature

Reviews of Tim O'Brien's Earlier Books

Articles About and By Tim O'Brien

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Jerry Bauer/ Broadway Books

Tim O'Brien

REVIEWS OF TIM O'BRIEN'S EARLIER BOOKS:

'If I Die in a Combat Zone' (1973)
". . . a beautiful, painful book, arousing pity and fear for the daily realities of a modern disaster."

'Going After Cacciato' (1978)
". . . combines a surface of realistic war reportage as fine as any in Michael Herr's recent 'Dispatches' with a deeper feel . . . of the surrealistic effect war has on the daydreams and nightmares of the combatants. To call 'Going After Cacciato' a novel about war is like calling 'Moby Dick' a novel about whales."

'The Nuclear Age,' reviewed by Grace Paley (1985)
"I wish the novel could have been either more surreal or less. It falls into an untranscending middle which muffles the important cry of 'Doom, doom.'"

'The Things They Carried' (1990)
". . . captures the war's pulsating rhythms and nerve-racking dangers. . . . high up on the list of best fiction about any war."

'In the Lake of the Woods' (1994)
". . . striking new novel . . . about the moral effects of suppressing a true war story . . . a novel about the unforgivable uses of history, about what happens when you try to pretend that history no longer exists."

ARTICLES ABOUT AND BY TIM O'BRIEN:

A Storyteller For the War That Won't End (April 3, 1990)
The New York Times interviewed Tim O'Brien shortly before he returned to Vietnam for the first time since his service there.

The Vietnam in Me, by Tim O'Brien (October 2, 1994)
For this New York Times Magazine article, O'Brien returned to the camp in Vietnam where he had served 25 years ago and finds it "utterly and forever erased from the earth. Nothing here but ghosts and wind."

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