It addresses one ostensibly ordinary object – a blanket – but quickly turns your ideas on their heads … Author Kara Thompson traverses a continent of meanings and implications, focusing on various artworks that use some type of blanket motif, or actual blankets, to illustrate metaphorical blankets, especially ones that deal with death. There is nothing trivial about this little book. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. Kara Thompson reveals blankets everywhere-film, art, geology, disasters, battlefields, resistance, home-and transforms an ordinary thing into a vibrant and vital carrier of stories and secrets, an object of inheritance and belonging, a companion to uncover. Curious, fearless, vulnerable, and critical, Blanket interweaves cultural critique with memoir to cast new light on a ubiquitous object. They shield us in mourning and witness our most intimate pleasures. We pull and tug on blankets to see us through the night or an illness. They keep us alive and they cover us in death. Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Blanket explores covers in everyday contexts, “New World” colonial encounters, contemporary art, emerging economies, and collecting practices to show how the blanket is not just an object of utility, but one that provides lessons in metaphor, viruses, and secrets.
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