Books like The Things They Carried

01

Dispatches

Michael Herr · Memoir

Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a correspondent for Esquire in 1967 and spent eighteen months embedded with Marine and Army units before the experience broke him psychologically.

Both dig into vietnam war.

02

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins · History

Dexter Filkins spent more than a decade covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times, and The Forever War is his attempt to render what he witnessed in a form that is closer to literature than journalism.

A kindred memoir read.

03

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand · Biography

Unbroken follows Louis Zamperini from his juvenile delinquency in Depression-era California to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he ran the 5,000 meters at nineteen and briefly caught Hitler's attention.

A kindred memoir read.

04

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe · History

Say Nothing opens with a scene that sets its register precisely: Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, is dragged from her Belfast flat by a gang of masked strangers in December 1972 and never seen alive again.

A kindred memoir read.

05

Beloved

Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

Beloved is set in post-Civil War Ohio, where Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in a house shadowed by the ghost of a baby she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery.

Both dig into memory and trauma.

06

In the Woods

Tana French · Mystery

Dublin detective Rob Ryan is called to investigate a child's murder at an archaeological dig in Knocknaree — the same woods where, twenty years earlier, two of his childhood friends vanished without a trace and Rob was found clinging to a tree, bloodied and with no memory of what happened.

Both dig into memory and trauma.

07

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam · History

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972, is both a history of American intervention in Vietnam and a study of institutional failure.

Both dig into vietnam war.

08

The Pentagon Papers

Neil Sheehan et al. · History

The Pentagon Papers is the popular name for a classified Defense Department study commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967, which documented the history of American involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

Both dig into vietnam war.

09

10% Happier

Dan Harris · Memoir

10% Happier is Dan Harris's account of discovering meditation after a panic attack live on Good Morning America in 2004 forced him to confront an anxiety problem he'd been managing with cocaine and a punishing work schedule.

A kindred memoir read.

10

A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis · Memoir

A Grief Observed is C.

A kindred memoir read.

11

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

A kindred memoir read.

12

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah · Memoir

Ishmael Beah was twelve years old when the Sierra Leone civil war reached his village and he was separated from his family.

A kindred memoir read.