So she set out on a journey to put human faces on those objects. It brought her to Brent Boyd, a logger in New Brunswick, Canada; Ruth Lamp, a supervisor at the Anchor Hocking glass factory in Lancaster, Ohio; and Basilio Salinas, who works in a coffee-field cooperative in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Not only that, but she went back in time to humans' first encounters with glass, paper and beans, ``whose true discoverers, the story goes, were lightning, wasps, and goats.''
Cohen's tracing of these three objects is fascinating, but what really sets it apart is the poetic beauty of her prose.
Her previous book was Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World (chosen by the American Library Association as one of 1994's best books), part memoir, part reportage about the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City's Jackson Heights section.
She grew up at the school, where her parents worked, and where her father, Oscar Cohen, is now superintendent.
In a recent interview, Cohen, 29, who graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the Columbia School of Journalism, recalled that as a child she and her sister so wanted to fit into the deaf world that dominated their universe that they would hold pretend conversations in sign language. Though both their parents are hearing, their paternal grandparents, immigrants from Russia, were deaf.
After Columbia Cohen spent a year researching Train Go Sorry (which, in sign language, basically means ``missed the boat'') and another eight months writing it.
Though she grew up with some understanding of American Sign Language, it wasn't until she was grown that Cohen took formal lessons and worked for a while as a sign-language interpreter.
Cohen also spent three semesters teaching nonfiction writing at Boston's Emerson College.
