The Things They Carried Audiobook

Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried burst upon the scene almost a generation ago, in 1990. Today, O’Brien’s tour-de-force book of interconnected Vietnam War short stories has become one of the most-read and most-celebrated literary looks at the Vietnam War—or any war, for that matter.

Things is a very readable, evocative tale of a group of men in combat filled with memorable characters. O’Brien spins out the stories in spare, precise writing that is lyrical and almost poetic in places. It’s sold more than two million copies, and has become the go-to Vietnam War literary work in countless high school and college English and Vietnam War history classes.

Which brings us to the new Things audio book, read by one of Hollywood’s hottest actors, Bryan Cranston (below ). The 57-year-old Cranston is best known for his comic portrayal of the father in the great TV show “Malcolm in the Middle, ” and as the shaved-headed Walter White, the central character on  “Breaking Bad, ” the much-ballyhooed AMC crime drama series.

The audio book, the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, features Cranston’s “calm, gravelly diction, unmarked by any noticeable regional accent, [which] carries a faint echo of Walter Cronkite, who delivered the news from ’Nam with a matter-of-factness inflected with moral concern.”

Cranston, Scott wrote, “is also a capable mimic, and he does the Army in different voices. Characters who on the page are names, fates and identifying attributes grow into a chorus of American regional and ethnic types—Native American, ­African-American, Midwestern, Southern.”

The book’s “two best sections—the account of an aimless drive around an Iowa lake interspersed with flashbacks to a horrible night in a Vietnamese bog, and the chronicle of an abortive flight to Canada on O’Brien’s part—take on new and gripping power.”

Also included in the audiobook is O’Brien’s essay “The Vietnam in Me” read by the former infantryman. The essay, published in 1994 in The Times , is O’Brien’s meditation on his service in the war, the legacy of that war, and his relationship with a woman who accompanied him on a trip back to Vietnam that year.

 

 

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