Book Alert / Evocative Objects

Evocative Objects -- Things We Think With, Edited by Sherry Turkle, MIT Press '07, $24.95, 385 pages, ISBN #0-262-20168-2.  Index, epigraph sources, selected bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

My father died suddenly 57 years ago while I was a small child. As the only child of his second marriage, I inherited a monogrammed silver hairbrush, with which I have brushed my hair each day since his death. The metal back fits comfortably into my palm, and I feel like part of my beloved father is touching me each time I stroke my hair. He had such hopes for me, and I find myself talking with him, from time to time, about important events in my life.

Such is the power of inanimate objects to evoke thoughts, memories, desires and to facilitate meditation. Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a deliciously offbeat study of what everyday objects do for us and to us.

In essays by three dozen people, objects are grouped into six themes: Objects of a) Design and Play, b) Discipline and Desire, c) History and Exchange, d) Transition and Passage, e) Mourning and Memory, and f) Meditation and New Vision. Turkle adds two essays of her own, exploring such issues as what makes an object evocative.

A couple of snippets illustrate the observations made by the essayists: Michelle Hlubinka writes, "My datebook and its events had their own esoteric language. Familiar venues, organizations, and individuals were noted in tiny writing and abbreviations that only I could decipher." Julian Beinart writes, "Although it looked like a Braun  transistor radio, this object never produced sound. I asked the boy about it and he said, 'It can't play music, but I sing when I carry it. One day I'll have a real one.'"

What's your evocative object?