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 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.

Andrew Solomon

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