Andrew Solomon / Far from theTree

Description

From the National Book Award-winning author of the “brave…deeply humane…open-minded, critically informed, and poetic” (The New York Times) The Noonday Demon, comes a book about the consequences of extreme personal and cultural difference between parents and children.

As a gay child of straight parents, Andrew Solomon was born with a condition that was considered an illness, but it became a cornerstone of his identity. While reporting on the explosion of Deaf pride in the 1990s, he began to consider illness and identity as a continuum with shifting boundaries. Spurred by the disability-rights movement and empowered by the Internet, communities with such “horizontal identities” are challenging expectations and norms. Their stories begin in families coping with extreme difference: dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, multiple severe disabilities, or prodigious genius; children conceived in rape, or who identify as transgender; children who develop schizophrenia or commit serious crimes. The adage asserts that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but in Solomon’s explorations, some apples fall on the other side of the world.

For ten years, interviewing more than 250 families, Solomon observed not just how some families learn to deal with exceptional children, but also how they find profound meaning in doing so. An utterly original thinker, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people who have somehow summoned hope and courage in the face of heartbreaking prejudice and almost unimaginable difficulty.
Far from the Tree is a masterpiece that will rattle our prejudices, question our policies, and inspire our understanding of the relationship between illness and identity. Above all, it will renew and deepen our gratitude for the herculean reach of parental love.


Andrew Solomon is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, A Stone Boat, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a New York Times bestseller, now published in twenty-two languages. He is completing a PhD in psychology at Cambridge. A member of the boards of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Columbia Medical School, Solomon is also a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell and Special Advisor on LGBT affairs to the Yale School of Psychiatry. He is a dual national, and lives in New York and London with his husband and children.

At Hillside Club (2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley)

Tickets $12 ($7 students, OLLI, and Hillside members) in advance only at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006; $15 at the door (all)

"This is 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.” -- Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies

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