Editions

The Reckoning

The Reckoning

'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)

Reviews

  • "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"

    Salon.com

  • "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"

    Time

More from this Author

About the Author

Andrew Solomon

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.

Andrew Solomon

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