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Bezig met laden... Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family's Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time (2010)door Lisa Tracy
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.  muumi | May 8, 2017 |   Blurb: “About the history of certain carefully collected heirlooms and why we hold on to the things we keep and how we let go of the ones we lose.” Lisa Tracy found herself, along with her sister Jeanne, responsible for cleaning out her deceased parents’ home, jammed full of the belongings they had gathered over a lifetime. I also had to clear out my mother’s house, full of her possessions. But there the similarities end. Tracy’s parents collected museum quality antiques with high dollar value, and lovely family stories attached. I, sadly, couldn’t relate. Recommended for someone whose parents are well-to-do and will be leaving a house that someone (maybe them!) will need to clear out. 3 stars (  ) ParadisePorch | Dec 5, 2016 | I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that Tracy would focus on her family's furniture and household goods since she's the former Home & Design editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It's not the best place to look for what it seems like she was looking for – an understanding of the challenges faced by earlier generations of her family, the reasons behind the choices they made, how those choices shaped their lives and the lives of future generations, and how their personalities still echo in her own life. Tracy and I are not kindred spirits, as this passage illustrates: I'm poking around my living room, looking for something to pass the time, when my eyes finally fall upon the sandalwood keepsake box that belonged to {her grandmother} Jeanne. I open it out of boredom as much as curiosity. One more family item to process, this box that lay unexamined all these years, and which I brought back with me finally, when we packed Mother's house. In the end I took it home with me just because it was fairly small—a little bigger than a shoebox—and I was afraid it would get lost in the shuffle. To my surprise, I find the box is packed to the lid with letters, carefully bundled and tied with string or ribbon. She had this box for years without opening it once?! I can't imagine ever doing that. I would be more interested in the contents of the box than in the box itself. Tracy admits to launching her search through the family documents with a view to providing provenance for the furniture and collectibles she and her sister were planning to sell at auction. Genealogical research might have given Tracy more satisfactory answers than she gathered from the stories and memories attached to the family heirlooms. As meaningful as they can be, heirlooms can only ever tell part of a family's story. (  ) cbl_tn | Sep 10, 2016 | It's not an easy book to read, full as it is with could have beens. But it is indeed interesting to peer in the corner of a window at this family. ( )1  satyridae | Apr 5, 2013 | Mostly, I suppose, I wanted to just shake her that she didn't pay more attention to her mother while she could have. Of course, one of the points of the book was so that she could beat herself up quite nicely (and publicly) over the same issues. But really! I ask you: How can you auction off your family's heirlooms and not realize you will have seller's remorse? In the end, though, I did enjoy the research she was able to do after the fact. And for those families with military background, I think they will find much resonance in this book. I think it would make a good "book club" book... (  ) kaulsu | Mar 8, 2012 | geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
After their mother's death, Lisa Tracy and her sister, Jeanne, are left to contend with several households' worth of furniture and memorabilia, much of it accumulated during their family's many decades of military service in far-flung outposts from the American frontier to the World War Two-era Pacific. In this engaging and deeply moving book, Tracy chronicles the wondrous interior life of those possessions and discovers that the roots of our passion for acquisition often lie not in shallow materialism but in our desire to possess the most treasured commodity of all: a connection to the past. What starts as an exercise in information gathering designed to boost the estate's resale value at auction evolves into a quest that takes Lisa Tracy from her New Jersey home to the Philippines and, ultimately, back to the town where she grew up. These travels open her eyes to a rich family history characterized by duty, hardship, honor, and devotion--qualities embodied in the very items she intends to sell. Here is an inventory unlike any other: silver gewgaws, dueling pistols that once belonged to Aaron Burr (no, not those pistols), a stately storage chest from Boxer Rebellion-era China, providentially recovered family documents, even a chair in which George Washington may or may not have sat--each piece cherished and passed down to Lisa's generation as an emblem of who her forebears were, what they had done, and where they had been. Each is cataloged here with all the richness and intimacy that only a family member could bring to the endeavor. "Even as we know we should be winnowing, we're wallowing," observes Lisa Tracy in one of her characteristically trenchant observations about America's abiding obsession with "stuff." 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 and lore, as well as a thoughtful meditation on the emotional resonance of objects--what they mean and the oh-so-fascinating stories they tell. From the Hardcover edition. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)745.097309The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Decorative Arts Biography And History North America United StatesLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.5)
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I can relate to this story, albeit with some envy because when my mother (and her mother, both enthusiastic and knowledgeable collectors of 18th century antiques) passed away, her father and sister predeceasing her, I was still in my teens. In my semi-homelessness at the time, I was able to retrieve only a few small items from the sale of effects. The mystification (What was Uncle Roy doing with a Qing dynasty civil servant's rank insignia when family stories say that he engineered in Central America?) and sadness are the same that Tracy describes. I hope that other readers will find this book early enough in their own history to appreciate it as a cautionary tale. (