Far From The Tree
Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
**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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Andrew Solomon’s expansive survey of parents who find themselves raising children with a “horizontal identity” that deviates from their own is not only fascinating, but also deeply personal and emotional. The American journalist spent years interviewing mothers and fathers of autistic children, prodigies and convicted criminals, hearing parents of deaf kids and many other groups to examine how compassion and love work (or break down) in extreme circumstances. We were profoundly moved by this book. Anchoring the incredible stories Solomon recounts is a passionate sense of mission—to show us that it’s possible to learn to cherish those who we see as very different.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A profoundly moving new work of research and narrative by National Book Award winner Solomon (The Noonday Demon) explores the ways that parents of marginalized children being gay, dwarf, severely disabled, deaf, autistic, schizophrenic, the product of rape, or given to criminal tendencies or prodigious musical talent, to name a few he chose have been transformed and largely enriched by caring for their high-needs children. These children are marginalized by society, classified traditionally as ill and abnormal, and shunned; in the cases of those who are deaf or homosexual, they were forced to conform to mainstream strictures. A seasoned journalist and LGBT activist, Solomon relies on anecdotes to convey the herculean tasks facing parents and caregivers of special-needs children because "stories acknowledge chaos," and he takes great pains to probe the dark side of parental despair and anger, as well as ennobling efforts of resilience and strength. Sifting through arguments about nature versus nurture, Solomon finds some startling moments of discovery, for example, among Deaf activists who ferociously cling to their marginality, parents of children with Down syndrome who express their children's infinite "mystery and beauty," and the truculent compassion of Dylan Klebold's parents, 10 years after the Columbine High School shootings. Solomon's own trials of feeling marginalized as gay, dyslexic, and depressive, while still yearning to be a father, frame these affectingly rendered real tales about bravely playing the cards one's dealt.
