Book Review: ‘The Empathy Diaries,’ by Sherry Turkle - The New York Times

Why bury the lede? Sherry Turkle’s memoir, “The Empathy Diaries,” is a beautiful book. It has gravity and grace; it’s as inexorable as a fable; it drills down into the things that make a life; it works to make sense of existence on both its coded and transparent levels; it feels like an instant classic of the genre. Turkle is a clinical psychologist and a thinker about the ethics of technology and online life. She has taught for decades at M.I.T., and her books include “Alone Together” (2011) and “Reclaiming Conversation” (2015). She’s now in her 70s. Her memoir is intellectually ambitious. She evokes the hothouse atmosphere at Radcliffe and Harvard in the late 1960s, when she was an undergraduate. She sketches fine, small profiles of the professors who influenced her, including the gregarious Martin Peretz in the years before he bought The New Republic magazine, and the sociologist David Riesman, the author of “The Lonely Crowd” (1950). Turkle studied in Paris in the early 1970s, and

Why bury the lede? Sherry Turkle’s memoir, “The Empathy Diaries,” is a beautiful book. It has gravity and grace; it’s as inexorable as a fable; it drills down into the things that make a life; it works to make sense of existence on both its coded and transparent levels; it feels like an instant classic of the genre. Turkle is a clinical psychologist and a thinker about the ethics of technology and online life. She has taught for decades at M.I.T., and her books include “Alone Together” (2011) and “Reclaiming Conversation” (2015). She’s now in her 70s. Her memoir is intellectually ambitious. Sh