Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried"

There is a thin line between fact and fiction. This is particularly true in Tim O'Brien's THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. Tim O'Brien expertly dealt with words as he described the atrocities of war in this book.

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" goes beyond the usual fare of war fiction. As a matter of fact it goes beyond fiction despite the fact that the author labeled it as "a work of fiction" on the title page. The book is an amalgamation of several genres - a memoir, a novel, and a collection of short stories.

O'Brien's genius lies in the fact that he turns fiction into something real so much so that the demarcation of fiction and fact in this story is hardly noticeable. You can never tell when the fact ended and the imagination begins. The war fiction is not about the usual war story where gory tales of hatcheted bodies and non-stop killings abound. Instead, one finds a certain attachment to the characters as O'Brien skillfully narrates the emotional and psychological impact of war on them.

Tim contemplated on how he was indecisive about being drafted for the war. The character Tim O'Brien reacts to his draft notice by going to the Canadian border and spends six days in a isolated lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he debates on whether he should evade the draft or accept it. In the end, he decided to go to war not so much he believes in it but more so because he does not want to put his family to shame.

O'Brien explores "the things they carried" both figuratively and literally through the intermittent narration of the lives, even death, of the soldiers comprising the Alpha Company. O'Brien masterfully recounts the emotions going through a soldier during unforgettable moments of his life: his feelings when drafted, his guilt when forced to kill an enemy, his shock at seeing friends or fellow soldiers killed in action and the gnawing feeling of homesickness.

The plot is simple but told several times through different character's point of view, making it appear more complex than it seems. Love is one of the motivating factor for Tim's need to tell the story. Tim O'Brien, the character professes his love for a girl when they were little.

In the end, Tim admitted that his penchant for telling stories and why he needs to do it as he relates his life to the soldiers. He knows it can bring the dead loved ones back to life, as if they are still with us. The soldiers do this to shield them from painful memories of losing a friend or killing a person. Tim, the character, tells stories since he was a child, when he lost the first girl he ever loved to brain tumor. The stories may change -characters, places, and events - but the storyteller keeps the memories alive.

Dinosaur Heresies: A Review

Errors in the scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

One does not need to be addicted to dinosaurs to be able to appreciate from Bakker’s Dinosaur Heresies. Anyone can enjoy this book and gain something from reading it. This book shows why Bakker is one of the top paleontologist of his time and also explained why some of his colleagues are irritated by his theories. The observations he lays on this book will challenge some views held by either his colleagues or the rest of us.

Dinosaur Heresies basically talks about the errors in scientific understanding of dinosaurs. His thesis in The Dinosaur Heresies is that the generally accepted view of dinosaurs is that they are cold blooded, reptilian dullards and an evolutionary dead end. Bakker pointed out that this concept is wrong. As a matter of fact, dinosaurs were one of the most successful groups of land animals in history. The same way that mammals are warmblooded and active today.

To many, this seemed a new, radical idea. But Bakker quickly states that this is not a new idea at all. As a matter of fact, it was the most accepted view from the time the dinosaurs were first discovered until the 1920’s. This correct view however was replaced in the succeeding years particularly around 1920’s to the 1960’s by the foolish view that the dinosaurs were somewhat of a failure. Bakker did not try to explain how this erroneous idea evolved through the years. His focus on this book is primarily centered on the case for his theory of warmblooded dinosaurs rather than discuss the history of dinosaur paleontology.

In the book, Bakker presents his ideas in a clear, methodological method. He first examines the generally accepted theories and concepts to be able to show where its deficiencies are, and to show some evidence against the theory. Bakker does this by not just pointing out the characteristics in the dinosaurs themselves, but also looking at reptiles that are alive today. He compared the dinosaurs to the present-day reptiles and show us where they differe to each other.

After he showed us that the old theories about dinosaurs have serious flaws, he then proceed to show where dinosaurs lived in the past and what they lived on. This is again to show, in great details, the mistakes in the cold blooded theory and the idea that plant eaters like Brontosaurus ate mushy waterplants to be alive. The fact that dinosaurs ate in order to live that proves that if dinosaurs were coldblooded, they would not have needed food as much as warmblooded animals do; Bakker shows that dinosaurs could eat and probably did eat as much as mammals similar to their size do.

He then goes on to explain how the dinosaurs moved and lived. He also examined the relationship between plant eaters and predators. He also pointed out how an arms race erupted a number of times in dinosaur history between armored plant eaters and the very nasty predators. The plant eaters depended heavily on an active, warmblood style of defense instead of the coldblooded “wait it out” defense. In this part of the book Bakker made a controversial claim that there is a possibility that one kind of dinosaurs never died out.

Bakker also looks at the direct evidence for warmbloodedness in dinosaurs by looking at their sex lives, also by their fast rates of growth from hatchling or newborn dinobaby to adult size and the ratio of predators to prey, all of these shows that dinosaurs were indeed warmblooded.

Finally, Bakker puts dinosaurs into their new context, quickly sketching their rise and fall, with the interesting thing being that he does not believe in the idea that the dinosaurs died out due to a meteor impact, an idea that has been largely confirmed since then. He ends the book by argueing that dinosaurs deserve to be taken out of the class Reptilia and there should be a new class created just for them, Dinosauria, with birds as one branch of it, which are the sole surviving dinosaurs.

What The Dinosaur Heresies expounds in the book has now become the new orthodox view of dinosaurs and newer, more up to date books are pushing this view similar to Bakker’s. This book laid the foundation for this revolution in concepts of dinosaur paleontology. Most of the views it holds is still largely correct and it is highly readable and clear. You feel smarter for having read it. And the illustrations, all done by Bakker himself, both proper drawings and sketches showed some incredibly cute looking dinosaurs are very appropriate for the book.

Some of the science in it is subject to debate; but the enthusiasm with which the book is written is infectious. Bakker clearly love discussing all things pertaining to dinosaurs. It jumps around cheerfully from subject to subject, talking about subjects pertaining to dinosaurs such as anatomy, physiology, extinction and much more. The prose is easy to read and very interesting, and Bakker’s own beautiful black-and-white illustrations make it all the more understandable which capture his vision of fast, powerful, active dinosaurs.

Bakker knows that challenging generally accepted ideas requires innovative thinking backed by solid evidence. It’s probably the same problem that Darwin faced when introducing evolution through natural selection. The evidence is there, it simply takes a perceptive eye and logical thinking to point it out clearly.

Bakker is able to do just that in this book. He is also good in writing and presenting his ideas and conclusions. Much of the fossil data has an extensive history. He has a very good ability to make field research understood by a wide spectrum of readers. The evidence and conclusions he presented are clear and unambiguous.

The nice thing about The Dinosaur Heresies is that Bakker provides his reasoning for his thoughts on the dinosaurs in a clear, accessible manner especially for those who are not dinosaur buffs. He discusses lizards and their niches and how this might or might not apply to dinosaurs, moas and how their digestive systems may have mirrored that of Brontosaurus. It helps that Bakker is also a decent artist and can illustrate his ideas well.

There is, for example, a clean and informative drawing of a crane, a stegosaur, and an African elephant, showing leverage points and bracing that lead him to the conclusion that if an elephant can stand on it’s rear legs, then a stegosaur most certainly could; much better ligament bracing down it’s spine, and twice the leverage between spine and hip.

Bakker is also smart enough to admit that his theories are not new. Throughout the book he gives credit to papers published in the last century way before his book came out. He is more concerned about getting the idea right rather than credit.

The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture by Rene Pache: A Review

Where does the bible come from? How can a fallible man have penned an infallible bible?

The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture by Rene Pache scrutinizes and presents facts regarding the inerrancy of the scripture. It addresses such baffling question as how can a fallible man produce an infallible Bible? Then it examines the Bible closely with regards to its views on revelation and its inspiration. It delves on the testimony on the Bible given by Christ and the church centuries ago. Pache then sums up theories brought up regarding the Scripture and finally discusses the supernatural qualities which provide evidence to the divine origin of the Scripture and which back up its authority on the word of God.

The first chapter of the book tackles the Revelation from God. It posed some really important, thought-provoking questions to the readers. “Man on earth is placed in a paradoxical situation. Endowed with intelligence and logic, he seems intended to know the reason for his existence and the meaning of it, as well as the origin of the universe and the person of his Creator. Actually, however, he finds himself surrounded by mysteries. Left to his own devices, he is incapable of answering the questions which press in on him so closely.”

Among these questions that baffles mankind is the infallibility of the Bible. Some people accept the idea that the Bible is the inspired Word of God to some extent. To what degree is the Bible an inspiration of God’s Word? Does it extend to every word?

To this question, Pache has an answer. “The doctrine of plenary inspiration holds that the original documents of the Bible were written by men, who, though permitted to exercise of their own personalities and literary talents, yet wrote Linder the control and guidance of the Spirit of God, the result being in every word of the original documents a perfect and errorless recording of the exact message which God desired to give to man.” (The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, p. 173).

Sometimes biblical writers use a specific phrase or quote or even a single word to prove their point that the Bible is completely God inspired. For instance in Galatians 3:16 the apostle Paul cites Genesis 13:15 and 17:8 when God said to Abraham, “Unto your seed (descendant) will I give this land”. Paul’s whole argument is due to the fact that in this particular line, God uses singular descendant rather its plural noun. Rene Pache, in The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture (p. 77), gives an explanation to this idea. He said that “very often the meaning of a whole passage rests entirely on one word, a singular or a plural number, the tense of a verb, the details of a prophecy, the precision of a promise and the silence of the text on a certain point.”

The inspiration and authority of the Bible are one of the important considerations in learning the truths about God, Christ and salvation. That is why knowing the scope of inspiration in every book and every word of the Scripture is of massive. The way to getting to the heart of the matter however is contained in the pages of the document in question itself, the Bible.

The authority of the Bible then stems from the fact that the Bible is an inspired revelation from God. Pache delves on the questions of revelation and inspiration with regard to the Bible. And by doing so, as he manages to address those questions and establish the source of inspiration, then it necessarily addresses the issue of authority also. In short, by proving its inspiration, the question of authority has been settled. How one looks at the issues on revelation and inspiration will determine how he perceive the Bible’s authority.

Since the written revelation contained in the Bible comes from God and has been recorded under the Spirit’s guidance which makes them “the very breath of God,” it naturally follows that what they contain are therefore authoritative. They gain authority by virtue of the fact that they come from the One Authority on the topic. In essence, this would lead us to conclude and give us the necessary assurance that when thumbed the pages of the Bible, we see and read the inspired Word of God.

We need to keep in mind that the authority of Scripture could not possibly be separated from the authority of God. What the Bible affirms, it follows that God affirms too. And what the Bible affirms (or denies), the affirmation (or denial) is clothe with the authority of God. Theologian Rene Pache states this in his book, as he observes that “if God entirely inspired Scripture (as we have seen that He did), then Scripture is vested with His authority.”