Solomon - The Noonday Demon

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ANDREW SOLOMON is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, the president of the PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker , NPR, and The New York Times Magazine . A lecturer and activist, he is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost ; the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity ; and a novel, A Stone Boat , which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. The Noonday Demon won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. His TED talk on depression has more than 4 million views. He lives with his husband and son in New York and London and is a dual national. He and a college friend also have a daughter. For more information, visit the authors website at andrewsolomon.com.

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THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS

COVER DESIGN BY SUSAN MITCHELL COVER AQUATINT: GIANT BY FRANCISCO DE GOYA,

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, HARRIS BRISBANE DICK FUND, 1935 (35.42)

Praise for

The Noonday Demon

The Noonday Demon is the ideal and definitive book on depression. There is nothing falsely consoling about this account, which is the opposite of a bromide, unless to be accompanied by so much intelligence and understanding is a consolation in itself.

Edmund White, author of A Boys Own Story and The Flneur

An exhaustively researched, provocative, and often deeply moving survey of depression... original and vividly recounted. Solomon writes engagingly; his style is intimate and anecdotal... witty and persuasive. Over all... The Noonday Demon is a considerable accomplishment. It is likely to provoke discussion and controversy, and its generous assortment of voices, from the pathological to the philosophical, makes for rich, variegated reading.

Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.

W. G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants

Its a compendium, its a think piece; its both!... Remarkable... [Solomon] has a killer eye for detail, as well as curiosity and compassion.

Emily Nussbaum, The Village Voice

A wrenchingly candid, fascinating, and exhaustive tour of one of the darker chambers of the human heart.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

Everyone will find a piece of himself in Solomons account, even if he has been spared the experience of watching that kernel blossom into a monstrous and strangling plant.... Solomon shows bravery and rigor.

Christopher Caldwell, Slate magazine

Solomon is able to examine depression in its considerable darkness, with an unblinking look at its sometimes lethal agonies. His greatest brilliance, however, is in his capacity to consider depression in the light, to recognize that there are elements of the experience that challenge its sufferers to learn, to change, and to salvage joy wherever they may find it. Personal or professional experience with depression are not prerequisites for this book. Its a great readfor anyone.

Martha Manning Ph.D., clinical psychologist and author of Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

Exhaustive and eloquent.

Maria Russo, Salon.com

Andrew Solomons book is an extraordinarily honest testimony about suffering, which often touches, and is touched by, illumination.

John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and To the Wedding

Painfully honest, sometimes shocking... Few books are as powerful or as controversial, as distressing or, at times, as wryly humorous.... The Noonday Demon is poised to be a classic of our time.

Alice Fowler, Night & Day

Andrew Solomons The Noonday Demon is as gripping as a thriller, and at the same time it has the seriousness and weight of a literary landmark.

John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Solomon says theres positive power in our demons. This extraordinary book tackles despair from the inside out.

Richard Avedon

A brilliant, kaleidoscopic portrayal of the human experience of depression.

James Watson, discoverer of DNA, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Double Helix

An exhaustively researched, provocative, and moving survey of depression, engagingly rendered by a man brave enough to say that he loves his depression because it helped him find his soul.

The New York Times

The Noonday Demon is an amazingly rich and absorbing work that deals with depression on many levels of perception. In its flow of insights and its scopeencompassing not only the authors own ordeal but also keen inquiries into the biological, social, and political aspects of the illness The Noonday Demon has achieved a level of authority that should assure its place among the few indispensable works on depression.

William Styron, author of Darkness Visible

Frank... clearheaded [and] valuable...

Entertainment Weekly

Andrew Solomons The Noonday Demon is immensely readable and should be universally useful. It is indeed an atlas of depression, sensitively chronicling the illnesss characteristics, social and cultural history, modes of treatment, and prospects. What makes it remarkable is a highly individual blend of the personal and the dispassionate, the work of a benign intelligence.

Harold Bloom, author of How to Read and Why and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Triumphant... Solomon looks at the idea of depression from every angle imaginable.

David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

Compulsively readable, harrowing, and helpful, The Noonday Demon is an act of redemption in an epidemic of sorrow.

Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife

Solomons done his homework... smart, lucid, and sometimes intensely moving.

David Gates, Newsweek

As the great Flaubert discovered, its hard to write about boring people without being boring oneself. Similarly, its hard to write at length about depression without depressing the reader. Yet in The Noonday Demon , Andrew Solomon, through his candor, intellectual elegance, and ultimately his human resilience, manages to write of traumas both deep and ordinary without leaving the reader traumatized. His book is a large achievement.

Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Lonesome Dove

Solomons highly readable, tag-all-bases new book... gives us nothing less than an evolving portrait of who, collectively, we are... ambitious and broadly synthesizing... [written with] considerable stylistic grace.... Solomon is knowledgeable, trenchant, and an admirable distiller of facts and perspectives.

Sven Birkerts, The New York Observer