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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935, and so he lived through World War II as a child in Imperialist Japan. This puts him in a position that few Americans can truly understand. For 10 years, he was taught that the Emperor was God, and the gloy of the Empire was all that mattered. And suddenly, in the flash of two Atomic bombs, that ended. The entire moral system that a generation of people were raised on collapsed. He is to accept the fine, Liberal values of the West, but on what foundation do they rest? In short, his generation was robbed of it's ethical heritage. The Emperor was human. The morality of the West can only be seen in the eyes of someone who witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima and… Read more
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
This book is the cure to all those [] self-help type introductions to Buddhism you see these days. This is far from a scholalry book, only suited for dry academics, but at the same time, it doesn't pidgeon hole all of the Buddha's teachings into a few maxims for the Busy American to absorb on the way to the gym or work. I can't gaurantee that you'll become a Buddhist after reading this, or even have much desire to (I know I didn't), but I simply do not see how you can walk away from it without some insight into how you live your life. At the very least, this book will cause you to locate your own self-deprecating actions and stop them (without being new age-y, or full of [] pop psychology)… Read more
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I was pleasently suprised to find this novel. It's a collection of short stories loosely connected to the exploits of a company of soilders in 1968 in the jungles of Vietnam. Except it's not. It's really not a collection of short fictional stories, but a searing memoir of the events that haunt the real life Tim O'Brien. Except it's not. It's actually a fully fictional novel, using emotions and symbology to convey the political and personal horror of Vietnam. Except it's not. The truth is that The Things They carried is all of this and more. It's easy to (attempt to) pidgen hole this book into a perfect category, but the truth is, it's undefinable. It's seemingly a simple book, and the first… Read more
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