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Reading lists

7 travel writers you need to know

The Noonday Demon

WITH A NEW EPILOGUE BY THE AUTHOR 
 
The most affecting, intelligent, important and constructive book on depression there has ever been - a key text by a New Yorker writer who has not only experienced the depths of depression but has researched every aspect of it.

The best book ever on depression.  Andrew Solomon explains everything with a sharp, scientific clarity.

The history, treatment and even politics of depression are thoroughly covered… Solomon’s brutal honesty makes this the best account of depression I have ever read.

Extraordinary and redeeming... A work of great charm and individuality but also of impressive scholarship

Few books are as powerful, as controversial or, at times, as wryly humorous... Poised to become a classic of our time: a key text for a generation that has depression at its core

Fascinating and warm-hearted... Compelling, wide-ranging, open-minded, useful, a testimony of the mind's power to overcome the most formidable obstacles and that offers hope to us all

A groundbreaking book... Eloquently impassioned, exhaustive

Andrew Solomon holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge; is a professor of psychology at Columbia University and President of PEN American Center; and is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. A lecturer and activist, he is the author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other awards; and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. His TED talks have been viewed over 12 million times. A dual UK/US national, he lives in London and New York. www.andrewsolomon.com.

WITH A NEW EPILOGUE BY THE AUTHOR 
 
Like Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, The Noonday Demon digs deep into personal history, as Andrew Solomon narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonising experience of depression. 
 
Solomon also portrays the pain of others, in different cultures and societies whose lives have been shattered by depression and uncovers the historical, social, biological, chemical and medical implications of this crippling disease. He takes us through the halls of mental hospitals where some of his subjects have been imprisoned for decades; into the research labs; to the burdened and afflicted poor, rural and urban. He talks to faith healers and voyages around the world in a quest for folk wisdom. He analyses the medications of today as well as reviewing the politics of diagnosis and treatment and, perhaps most significantly, he looks at the vital role of will and love in the process of recovery. 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The Reckoning

When the television cameras have gone and the victims are being mourned, what's next for the killer's family? Will they ever understand what went wrong? 
 
The prize-winning author of Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon, talks to the father of the Sandy Hook killer.

Solomon tells the story of Peter Lanza, the father of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter. Read it—it’s moving, brave and just profoundly human and sad....There aren’t any answers. And that’s what makes this all so impossible, and Solomon’s journalism so essential

Both parents loved Adam. Neither parent imagined or wanted their child’s horrific end. This is why what Peter Lanza did by sharing his story with Andrew Solomon is so important. Lanza’s story fills important gaps in our understanding of how a beloved child became a killer—and reminds us as a society that we have an obligation to help families and children before they find themselves on irreversible paths of violence

'How much do I beat myself up about the fact that he's my son? A lot.' 
 
On 14 December 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza shot his mother dead, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, opened fire and killed twenty children and six adults. No motive has ever been uncovered. 
 
Adam Lanza's father is still searching for answers and in this moving interview Andrew Solomon tells his story. 
 
This ebook also includes a chapter on children who commit crime from Solomon's Wellcome Trust Book Prize-winning book, Far from the Tree: Parents, children and the search for identity. ('A book everyone should read' Julie Myerson; 'Extraordinary, moving' Spectator)

Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Far From The Tree

**WINNER OF THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2014** 
 
Sometimes your child – the most familiar person of all – is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does?

The tales Solomon returns with, of profound disability and extreme differences overcome, make it a bible of empathy and inclusion

Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree is a prodigious, illuminating book about the challenge of being a parent – especially when children are out of the ordinary

Life-affirming, thought provoking and highly readable, the book was compiled over 10 years of interviews and I found it deeply moving

Many accounts are desperately moving, but Solomon goes far beyond cheap pity... The book is an exquisite written study of parental love – as well as "a how-to manual for receptivity"

[A] magnificent study of disability and identity differences

This wise book is a careful and surprising study of difference between parent and child and how it shapes our lives

For anyone struggling with decisions over parenting, it’s an affirming reminder that there is no such thing as “normal”

Parents – especially mothers – are the heroes of this book, many of them describing with extraordinary absence of self-pity how they have coped with almost unimaginable adversity

Solomon really makes you think... Uniquely brilliant

A fascinating examination of the accommodation of difference... Philosophical dividends accrue as you read story after story of ordinary families made remarkable by circumstance

A far-reaching and fascinating study upon humanity... It is intelligent and is certainly an important contribution to the field of child psychology

It is very rare for a book to smack the reader in the face, almost with every paragraph. That this reviewer had constantly to stop reading, in order to reflect and digest, is testament to a work of rare power... This book will change you

Utterly fascinating, beautifully written and deeply moving… Thoughtful and humane… Totally gripping from beginning to end

You may want to save it for a holiday or similar period as it will draw you in so completely that it is hard to stop reading

A beautifully written psychiatric study of difference and compassion

It's an incredible book, that had me crying on the bus more than once

I am staggered by these unsentimental and inspiring stories.

He writes unsentimentally… Reading this book changed the course of my work.

Far from the Tree is a landmark, revolutionary book… Andrew Solomon plumbs his topic thoroughly, humanely, and in a compulsively readable style that makes the book as entertaining as it is illuminating.

One of the most extraordinary books I have read in recent times – brave, compassionate and astonishingly humane. Solomon approaches one of the oldest questions – how much are we defined by nature versus nurture? – and crafts from it a gripping narrative. Through his stories, told with such masterful delicacy and lucidity, we learn how different we all are, and how achingly similar. I could not put this book down.

A passionate and affecting work that will shake up your preconceptions and leave you in a better place. It’s a book everyone should read… there’s no one who wouldn’t be a more imaginative and understanding parent – or human being – for having done so… breathtaking reading.

Andrew Solomon reminds us that nothing is more powerful in a child’s development than the love of a parent. This remarkable new book introduces us to mothers and fathers – many in circumstances the rest of us can hardly imagine – who are making their children feel special, no matter what challenges come their way.

"Parenting," writes Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, "is no sport for perfectionists." It's an irony of the book, 10 years in the making and his first since The Noonday Demon, that by militating against perfectionism, he only leaves the reader in greater awe of the art of the achievable. The book starts out as a study of parents raising "difficult" children, and ends up as an affirmation of what it is to be human.

The first thing you should know about Andrew Solomon’s new book, Far From the Tree, is that it’s a monumental work. This is a masterpiece of non-fiction, the culmination of a decade’s worth of research and writing, and it should be required reading for psychologists, teachers, and above all, parents. Far From the Tree is a stunning work of scholarship and compassion.

Knotty, gargantuan and lionhearted… Mr. Solomon’s first chapter, entitled 'Son', is as masterly a piece of writing as I’ve come across all year. It combines his own story with a taut and elegant précis of this book’s arguments. It is required reading.

Far-reaching, original, fascinating - Andrew Solomon's investigation of many of the most intense challenges that parenthood can bring challenges us all to reexamine how we understand human difference. Perhaps the greatest gift of this monumental book, full of facts and full of feelings, is that it constantly makes one think, and think again.

An informative and moving book that raises profound issues regarding the nature of love, the value of human life and the future of humanity.

Solomon is a storyteller of great intimacy and ease… [He] creates something of enduring warmth and beauty: a quilt, a choir.

Andrew Solomon provides us with an unrivalled educational experience about identity groups in our society, an experience that is filled with insight, empathy and intelligence. Reading Far from the Tree is a mind-opening experience.

Eric Kandel, author of The Age of Insight and winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine

Solomon is in many ways the perfect writer for the subject – nuanced, thorough, humane, and a gifted stylist.

Far From the Tree is a book of extraordinary ambition… From a writer known primarily as a historian of sadness, this sweeping tribute to the joys of parental love can be startling and ecstatic.

Brought to life by its intimate domestic voices, many of them people who ended up falling in love with children they never knew they wanted

Nobody could read this extraordinary, moving book and not feel enlightened, but above all enlarged, by it.

I'd suggest this be made compulsory reading for an couple considering having a baby... This is a remarkable work: moving but never bathetic, challenging in parts but always worth the effort. I'd call it extraordinary - if only Solomon would let me.

A fascinating examination of the accommodation of difference

You don't so much read Far from the Tree as cohabit with it; its stories take up residence in your head and heart, messily unpack themselves and refuse to leave

A generous, humane and — in complex and unexpected ways  — compassionate book about what it means to be a parent

The book is about people and  their experiences and it is rich with their strategies, smiles and  sadnesses

Solomon writes movingly of the resources of support and  empathy that he found among communities of the deaf, dwarfs, transgender  children and people with Down’s syndrome

A catalogue of astonishing tenacity and unexpected joy that  inevitably expands both our sympathies and sense of wonder at the  immense variety of human experiences

This is a remarkable work: moving but never bathetic, challenging in parts, but always worth the effort

Nobody could read this extraordinary, moving book and not feel enlightened, but above all enlarged by it

Far From the Tree is the most important book I’ve ever read. It is a masterpiece of research; giving an impressive insight into human relationships and our tolerance of those who are different. If everyone read this book the world would be a better place

A monumental and generous-hearted book, balanced between the universal and the particular, and gorgeously observed

Solomon’s compassionate study of these dozen loves that are, and are not, like each other, illuminates not so much the heroism of difficult kinds of love as the adaptability of every kind

A triumphant celebration of the power of parental love

Forces] the reader to meditate on a number of wrenching, often heart-breaking aspects of existence. And to mediate as well on questions of stigma and prejudice, callousness and cruelty, the widespread and extraordinary intolerance of human diversity, and the horrors that those attitudes and behaviours heap on the heads of those whose lives are already extraordinarily difficult, and on the head of those who love and care for them

Andrew Solomon is a writer and activist working on politics, culture and psychology. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, Newsweek, and the Guardian. He is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell University and Special Adviser on LGBT Affairs to Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry. The Noonday Demon won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. His highly-acclaimed study of family, Far from the Tree won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction, the Lukas Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, among others. He lives with his husband and son in New York and London.

**WINNER OF THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2014** 
 
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Sometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does? 
 
Drawing on interviews with over three hundred families, covering subjects including deafness, dwarfs, Down's Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children born of rape, children convicted of crime and transgender people, Andrew Solomon documents ordinary people making courageous choices. Difference is potentially isolating, but Far from the Tree celebrates repeated triumphs of human love and compassion to show that the shared experience of difference is what unites us. 
 
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction and eleven other national awards. Winner of the Green Carnation Prize.

Andrew Solomon

His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance... You can see him exploring and honing the listening habits that led to that book on almost every page here... Solomon lives with his subjects as long as he is able – searching out the dissident artists of China and the Inuit of Greenland, 80% of whom suffer from depression. In this way Solomon builds a picture of the world we have inhabited in the last 25 years, seen from its four corners.

Solomon unites human history around the world through his intimate, personal accounts.

He is an engaging guide – keen-eyed, self-reflective, shrewd, humane – and these articles have a pleasing passion.

Andrew Solomon is every bit as magnificent a traveler as he is a writer - in fact, it's difficult at times to determine which is the greater talent. Thankfully, the reader gets to experience both gifts throughout the pages of this deeply impressive and profoundly moving collection. Here is man whose curiosities are vast (politics, art, food, psychology, anthropology), and whose intellect is beautifully honed, but whose spirit is humble and whose heart is enormous. You will not only know the world better after having seen it through Solomon's eyes, you will also care about it more.

This is a beautiful book, inspired by love of ‘away' and uncertainty about ‘home,' a celebration of freedom which valuably warns that freedom must sometimes be learned. Much more than 'travel writing,' it's a portrait of our world, made by someone who has been there.

From Cape Town to Bucharest, and Hangzhou to Tripoli, Andrew Solomon’s Far and Away is positively Whitmanian in its openness to difficulty and its embodiment of wonder. I felt exposed and expanded. This book is an ecstatic provocation to understand ourselves not as citizens of nations but as citizens of the entire world, a world whose territories are glorious and troubled and desperately connected.

Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays.

His writing is never less than deeply perceptive, and wonderfully humane.

Greater than the sum of its parts. It sparkles with insights great and small on the countries and people that [Andrew Solomon] has had the privilege to meet over the last quarter century. Although his perceptions are keen, what he delivers best and with enchanting clarity are their truths, fears, regrets, and hopes. Readers will most certainly be inspired to book a flight, finishing this book en route to some faraway place.

Solomon’s writing captures the sweep of history and social upheaval through vivid, fine-grained reportage that’s raptly attuned to individual experience.

Agile, informative, even revelatory pieces that, together, show us both the great variety of humanity and the interior of a gifted writer’s heart.

Far and Away is literary journalism at its cracking best.

The pieces, covering 25 years, are brilliant…models of unsparing lucidity and trenchant observation.

One of the most original thinkers of our time.

Solomon is an attentive and inquisitive anatomist of the ways that art is made within  a society.

Solomon has an outsider’s eagle eye. A dazzling volume.

[A] wonderful collection of essays… Dip in and out, and you will be richly rewarded over and again.

This is a book to open the eyes and broaden the mind.

As always, Solomon gets into the far corners of things, including people’s minds… He’s also very sharp on South Africa, China, Libya, Romania, and Brexit Britain, among others. He’s an expert on turmoil.

How Travel Can Change the World

In 1991 Andrew Solomon faced down tanks in Moscow with a band of Russian artists protesting the August coup. We find him on the quest for a rare bird in Zambia in 1998, and in Greenland in 2001 researching widespread depression among the Inuit. In 2002 he was in Afghanistan for the fall of the Taliban. He was brought in for questioning in Qaddafi’s Libya in 2006. In 2014 he travelled to Myanmar to meet ex-political prisoners as the country fitfully pushed towards freedom. Far and Away tells these and many other stories. With his signature compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities shift when governments change. 
 
A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon chronicles a life’s travels to the nexus of hope, courage, and the uncertainty of lived experience and tracks seismic shifts – cultural, political and spiritual. He takes us on a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences via intimate, deeply moving stories that reveal and revel in our common humanity.

Andrew Solomon

Praise for Far and Away

His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance... You can see him exploring and honing the listening habits that le ...

Solomon unites human history around the world through his intimate, personal accounts.

He is an engaging guide – keen-eyed, self-reflective, shrewd, humane – and these articles have a pleasing passion.

His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance... You can see him exploring and honing the listening habits that le ...

Solomon unites human history around the world through his intimate, personal accounts.

He is an engaging guide – keen-eyed, self-reflective, shrewd, humane – and these articles have a pleasing passion.

His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance... You can see him exploring and honing the listening habits that le ...

Solomon unites human history around the world through his intimate, personal accounts.

He is an engaging guide – keen-eyed, self-reflective, shrewd, humane – and these articles have a pleasing passion.

Books by Andrew Solomon

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