Criticism

Johnson, George. Review of The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. The New York Times Book Review (14 April 1991): 32.

Places O'Brien's The Things They Carried "high up on the list of best fiction about any war."

Ridenhour, Ron. "Riding the Night Winds." London Review of Books 17, No. 2 (22 June 1995): 12-14.

Reviews In the Lake of the Woods, asserting that O'Brien produced "a mystery so clever and so mysterious that few reviewers appear to have understood it."

Schweninger, Lee. "Ecofeminism, Nuclearism and O'Brien's The Nuclear Age." In The Nightmare Considered: Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature, edited by Nancy Anisfield, pp. 177-85. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991.

Proposes "to define a ecofeminist ethics as it relates to nuclearism in general and literature about nuclearism in particular," illustrating "a practical application of these speculations by applying this heuristics to O'Brien's novel."

Smith, Lorrie N. "The Things Men Do: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O'Brien's Esquire Stories." Critique XXXVI, No. 1 (Fall 1994): 16-40.

Argues that five stories, which first appeared during the 1980s in Esquire and later formed the core of The Things They Carried, offer "no challenge to a discourse of war in which apparently innocent American men are tragically wounded and women are objectified, excluded, and silenced." Smith uses this subtext "to position The Things They Carried within a larger cultural project to rewrite the Vietnam War from a masculinist and strictly American perspective."