Andrew Solomon - Far and away: reporting from the brink of change: seven continents, twenty-five years

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Praise for

FAR

and

AWAY

Andrew Solomon is every bit as magnificent a traveler as he is a writerin fact, its difficult at times to determine which is the greater talent. Thankfully, the reader gets to experience both gifts throughout the pages of this deeply impressive and profoundly moving collection. Here is a man whose curiosities are vast (politics, art, food, psychology, anthropology) and whose intellect is beautifully honed, but whose spirit is humble and whose heart is enormous. You will not only know the world better after having seen it through Solomons eyes, you will also care about it more.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

This is a beautiful book, inspired by love of away and uncertainty about home, a celebration of freedom which valuably warns that freedom must sometimes be learned. Much more than travel writing, its a portrait of our world, made by someone who has been there.

Salman Rushdie, author of Midnights Children and The Satanic Verses

From Cape Town to Bucharest, and Hangzhou to Tripoli, Andrew Solomons Far and Away is positively Whitmanian in its openness to difficulty and its embodiment of wonder. I felt exposed and expanded. This book is an ecstatic provocation to understand ourselves not as citizens of nations but as citizens of the entire world, a world whose territories are glorious and troubled and desperately connected.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

Agile, informative, even revelatory pieces that, together, show us both the great variety of humanity and the interior of a gifted writers heart.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Journalist and psychologist Solomon gamely plunges into global tragedies, hot spots, and cultural ferment.... Solomons writing captures the sweep of history and social upheaval through vivid, fine-grained reportage thats raptly attuned to individual experience.

Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written... Solomons fans, readers of travel literature, and students of long-form journalism will welcome this addition.

Library Journal

Far and Away is a reminder that, although foreign reporting isnt easy, and that American journalists probably get places wrong as often as they get them right, deep work is worth doing and worth paying for, both to encourage cultural exchange and because a skilled writer who reports at length may create literature.

Pacific Standard

Resilience, hope, flux: Solomon has an outsiders eagle eye. A dazzling volume.

The Spectator

Literary journalism at its crackling best.

The Mail on Sunday

What sets Solomon apart is a genius for exploring with openness and modesty the spirit of the places he is visiting.... Solomons vivid dispatches are a gift to humanity... bringing fleeting coherence to a world forever on the brink.

The Australian

If there is one quality that binds the books contents it is the authors fearlessness.... It is a boldness that reveals itself not in physical bravery (though he has learned to dive, he tells us, and has even gone skydiving), but in moral and emotional courage.... Solomons gifts are so wide-ranging it can be hard not to believe he comes from an earlier century, when the division between the arts and the sciences was less rigidly drawn.... Solomons voice, in this book, is wise and humane.

New Statesman

Solomon, an art historian and psychologist by training, is in the American-abroad tradition of Henry James. His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance.

The Observer

A bravura performance... superb... Solomon is admirably quick to empathise with the downtrodden and marginalised.

The Financial Times

Solomon unites human history around the world through his intimate, personal accounts.

The Guardian

Solomon has gifts of compassion and close attention.

The Economist

ALSO BY ANDREW SOLOMON

The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost

A Stone Boat

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

Zambia, 1997 (Photograph by Luca Trovato)

SCRIBNER

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Copyright 2016 by Andrew Solomon

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First Scribner trade paperback edition May 2017

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Cover design by Jonathan Bush

Cover art GS/Gallerystock

Library of Congress Control Number: 201604584

ISBN 978-1-4767-9504-1

ISBN 978-1-4767-9505-8 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4767-9506-5 (ebook)

for Oliver, Lucy, Blaine, and George, who have given me a reason to stay home

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

...

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there... No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel

Contents

Dispatches from Everywhere

W hen I was about seven, my father told me about the Holocaust. We were in the yellow Buick on New York State route 9A, and I had been asking him whether Pleasantville was actually pleasant. I cannot remember why the Nazis came up a mile or two later, but I do remember that he thought I already knew about the Final Solution, and so didnt have any rehearsed way to present the camps. He said that this had happened to people because they were Jewish. I knew that we were Jewish, and I gathered that if wed been there at the time, it would have happened to us, too. I insisted that my father explain it at least four times, because I kept thinking I must be missing some piece of the story that would make it make sense. He finally told me, with an emphasis that nearly ended the conversation, that it was pure evil. But I had one more question: Why didnt those Jews just leave when things got bad?