After their mother’s death, Lisa Tracy and her sister Jeanne were left with several households’ worth of belongings. After 10 years of paying storage fees, the sisters reluctantly decided to take them to auction. The result is a captivating personal memoir that captures why Americans are so obsessed with our things—and why we find it so difficult to let go.
In Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family’s Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time (A Bantam Hardcover; March 23, 2010), Lisa Tracy invites us into the rich history of a military family characterized by duty, hardship, honor, and devotion—qualities embodied in the very items she chronicles. Here she shares with us a collection unlike any other: silver gewgaws, mismatched cake plates, silk tapestries, dueling pistols that once belonged to Aaron Burr (no, not those pistols), a stately storage chest from Boxer Rebellion–era China, even a chair in which George Washington may or may not have sat. Dating back to the American Revolution, the furniture and other artifacts Tracy lovingly describes were collected over the course of centuries by ancestors posted all over the globe, cherished and passed down to her generation as an emblem of who her forebears were, what they had done, and where they had been.
A paean to the pack rat in us all, Objects of Our Affection offers an offbeat and intriguing mix of cultural anthropology, Antiques Roadshow Americana, and military history. In this engaging and deeply moving book, Tracy chronicles the wondrous interior life of those possessions and discovers that the roots of Americans’ passion for acquisition often lie not in shallow materialism but in our innermost desire to possess the most treasured commodity of all: a connection to our past.
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