We tend to view objects as either mundane, workaday items – tools – or as things of beauty, say a vase or a sculpture. But for Turkle, a sociologist, objects can be "companions to our emotional lives" and spurs to thought, or, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, "goods-to-think-with". Proust's evocative object was a madeleine which, when dipped in tea, unlocked "a vast structure of recollection". Turkle collects more than 30 brief autobiographical essays about such objects. For the architect William Mitchell the sight of an express train ("a synecdoche of urbanity") brings back his "bush childhood" in Australia and the life he made for himself in Melbourne. Susan Yee is inspired by handling original drawings by Le Corbusier, while Annalee Newitz writes of her "infatuation" with her laptop and the virtual world: "I was just a command line full of glowing green letters." A wonderfully evocative (there really is no other word for it) series of meditations on meaningful objects.