The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

Growing up in post-war Brooklyn, Sherry Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries.

She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father - and never to use his name, her name.

Before empathy was a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.

She learned friendship at a Harvard/Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the anti-war movement, mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and fought for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT.

There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections.