Blanket by Kara Thompson combines memoir writing with history and philosophy as well as art and culture.

I really enjoy the Object Lessons series every time I pick one up, and I never would have thought to question the place or history of the blanket, so this little tome was a great insight into something that humanity takes for granted. The book tracks the blanket through its different incarnations, from survival necessity to artistic material, activist flag and personal stories of loss and grief for human beings. There is some really inspiring discussion about the blanket's carriage of indigenous group traditions, and there is darker conversation around the utility of blankets in aiding during illness and covering in death. I wasn't quite expecting this to draw such an emotional response, and so I'm really glad I read it.

The newest Object Lessons book is called Blanket, but you will find precious little information about them in this brief volume.
Thompson uses the blanket as a metaphor for left-wing screeds on Native -American discrimination, conceptual art, gay rights , hazing and gun control.
As usual in this series, the most effective section involve personal anecdotes. In Blanket, Thompson relates how her older brother died of cancer while she was a teenager. The story of how he was buried with his blanket is, by far, the most touching moment in an otherwise tiresome book.

I really enjoyed this book as it not only the explored blankets as physical objects but items that relate to the temporality of society. The way that Thompson connected the personal history she has of them with the way that they are used by people and the acts they represent. This felt like it was part memoir and part academic study and this was clearly shown in how the structure of it and how she presented her arguments. It was an enjoyable and educational at the same time.

Thank you to Kara Thompson, Bloomsbury Academic, and Netgalley for this advanced reader copy of “Object Lessons: Blanket” for an honest review.

I am uncertain now what I first thought I was getting into when I requested this book, but it wasn’t what I got when I received. Instead I was invited by a beckoning hand, that wrapped a blanket around me, to come on a journey of all the things people do and have done with blankets, what they mean and can stand for.

This series can always throw a curveball of the impenetrable at the reader in the hope they don't duck. Here, the historical truth of disease-riddled blankets being given by the Brits to the Native North Americans to kill them off is looked at, but so are too many modern artworks destined for Pseud's Corner, Kubrick films, and more. I would have learnt more from, and appreciated more of, the more trivial aspects of the subject, such as airline blanket wash rotas. Either way, you certainly get an eclectic and learned look at a topic you'd never assume book-worthy, which is this series' raison d'etre.

Each of these Object Lessons series has something to offer, but I find some more interesting than others, and for me this was one of the less interesting ones. It’s a combination of exploration and memoir and I could have done without the memoir bit, as I didn’t feel it added anything to the subject. But the author admittedly achieves her end in making the reader think more about blankets and their significance to societies throughout the ages, ranging as she does from Native American blankets to school shootings to the Standing Rock pipeline protests to contemporary art installations. If anything I found the book just too diffuse and wide-ranging but I definitely became more conscious of the fact that “Blankets are everyday objects we take for granted….but blankets quietly record our histories”.

I have enjoyed all of the "Everyday Objects" series, as authors reflect on physical things which carry meaning far beyond their utility. In this one, Thompson considers blankets--ancient weaving modernized by the Navajo people with QR codes, children and blankets/transitional objects (and the Linus project to supply them to the traumatized), the AIDS memorial quilt and her brother's death, enslaved people using quilt patterns to pass messages and record history, the social obligations of receiving crocheted blankets, as well as the uglier side: smallpox blankets, "blanket parties" as hazing, and blankets used to cover the dead and injured.