Far From the Tree: Summary and book reviews of Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon, plus links to an excerpt from Far From the Tree and a biography of Andrew Solomon.
Far From the Tree Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
by Andrew Solomon
Hardcover: Nov 2012,
976 pages.
Paperback: 1 Oct 2013,
976 pages.
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 differences 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 has 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.
Far From the Tree felt, for this reader anyway, not only inspiring and compelling, but also personal because of its inclusive message. "Difference is what unites us," Andrew Solomon says. "While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state." Solomon is a champion of and for people with differences, and so, he's a champion for all of us. (Reviewed by Morgan Macgregor).
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. An informative and moving book that raises profound issues regarding the nature of love, the value of human life, and the future of humanity.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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...have been transformed and largely enriched by caring for their high-needs children.
Booklist
Starred Review. The truth Solomon writes about here is as poignant as it is implacable, and he leaves us with a reinvented notion of identity and individual value
President Bill Clinton
In Far from the Tree, 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 across America - many in circumstances the rest of us can hardly imagine - who are making their children feel special, no matter what challenges come their way.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies
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.
Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
Far-reaching, original, fascinating - Andrew Solomon's investigation of many of the most intense challenges that parenthood can bring compels 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.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point
Andrew Solomon has written a brave and ambitious work, bringing together science, culture and a powerful empathy. Solomon tells us that we have more in common with each other - even with those who seem anything but normal - than we would ever have imagined.
Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad Far from the Tree is a landmark, revolutionary book. It frames an area of inquiry - difference between parents and children - that many of us have experienced in our own lives without ever considering it as a phenomenon. 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 stories Solomon tells in Far From The Tree is about Ashley X (the last name is to protect identity), a disabled girl whose story generated a lot of controversy about disability and its treatment.
Ashley X, born in 1997, was diagnosed in infancy with static encephalopathy, a brain disorder that is similar to cerebral palsy. Ashley was labeled "Permanently Unabled," which means that she would remain at infant level, mentally and physically, for the duration of her life. Ashley cannot walk, talk, feed herself, raise her head, or turn over. She can sleep, she can wake, she can breathe, and she can smile. Ashley's parents call her their "Pillow Angel," and dedicate the majority of their days to caring for her in every way - tube-feeding, changing, bathing, dressing, positioning and entertaining.
When Ashley was six, she started showing signs of precocious puberty, which is common in children with brain damage. Her parents worried about both her growth and the pain and discomfort menstruation and bodily maturation would cause. Her parents feared...
A moving, deeply absorbing story of a family in crisis. What sets it apart from most fiction about difficult subjects such as autism, is the author's ability to write about a sad and frightening situation with a seamless blend of warmth, compassion and humor.
By turns heart-tugging and hilarious, Myron Uhlberg’s memoir tells the story of growing up as the hearing son of deaf parents—and his life in a world that he found unaccountably beautiful, even as he longed to escape it.
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(1294 words).
President Bill Clinton
