Deborah Cohen
The Lives of Others
Far from the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love
By Andrew Solomon
Chatto & Windus 962pp £30 order from our bookshop
Far from the Tree is a big book and an important one. In ten chapters, dealing with the subjects of deafness, dwarfism, Down’s syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children conceived through rape, children who commit crimes, and transgender children – framed by an autobiographical beginning and ending – Solomon investigates what it means for parents to love children who are different from themselves, and more broadly, the status of both disability and identity in contemporary society. At the heart of the book are interviews, some extending over a number of years, which Solomon conducted with more than three hundred families. The book is in addition a tour d’horizon of the literature (medical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, activist) on each subject. It clocks in at over nine hundred pages for good reason.
There are so many apt, even aphoristic, sentences in the book that the trouble is choosing from among them. Here is the conclusion of Solomon’s discussions with the parents of Cece. A ten-year-old girl diagnosed with severe autism, Cece has uttered only four completely appropriate sentences in her life: ‘Parents
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within two days of arriving at the retreat, he is called away to attend the funeral of a friend killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ... Carrère is soon divorced and suicidal, interned in a psychiatric institution where he must slowly rebuild his life.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lunge-twist-pose
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford