Andrew Solomon - The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

The winner of eleven national awards including a New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year

Both heartrending and fascinating... the book has a scope and passionate intelligence that give it intrigue as well as heft.

GAIL CALDWELL, The Boston Globe

T he Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populationsaround the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.

The book for a generation.... Solomon interweaves a personal narrative with scientific, philosophical, historical, political, and cultural insights.... The result is an elegantly written, meticulously researched book that is empathetic and enlightening, scholarly and useful.... Solomon apologizes that no book can span the reach of human suffering. This one comes close.

CHRISTINE WHITEHOUSE , Time

ANDREW SOLOMON studied at Yale University and Jesus College Cambridge. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, ArtForum, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost and a novel, A Stone Boat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. He is the winner of the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For more information, visit the authors website at www.noondaydemon.net .

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COVER DESIGN BY SUSAN MITCHELL COVER AQUATINT: GIANT BY FRANCISCO DE GOYA, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, HARRIS BRISBANE DICK FUND, 1935 (35.42)

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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 Flaneur

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 illnessThe 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.