Far from the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love by Andrew Solomon – review

A test study of how disability, crime or illness limits of parental love is moving powerfully

one a few weeks ago, I wrote an article on Google I found the way that the question "what is love?" Was almost always in the top 10 queries, minute by minute , until the search engine. In the future, Google would do well to remember the old Askers question in the sense of the extraordinary book by Andrew Solomon. In my experience, the days not so lu

far from the tree

and live with it, their stories are domiciled in the head and the heart, disorderly and refusing to unpack out. Once there, as one or a dozen working answers to the most urgent research shows hard to argue.

pages 976 to Solomon began 10 years ago as a type of research, and like all the missions of the writer was to start an effort on their part to understand as much as the world. The book seems to be a sort of sequel to positive volume the author of the previous history

Noonday Demon The

, published in 2001, which explored the poetic rigor weaknesses depression In particular, his own, which had fallen after the death of his mother, a planned act of suicide after a diagnosis of terminal cancer.

Solomon, a magazine journalist based in New York, begins again inside his head, with the impulses that made him become a writer - a sense of difference and disorders caused by dyslexia severe as a child, and by understanding that he was gay in adolescence dispositions which were partially offset by the tireless efforts of his parents to live as comfortably since childhood in a world of words, and by their own efforts trouble with their parents and others understand their sexuality. Solipsism is quickly imprison at will into something completely different, however, when Solomon embarks on the search for those who make their own anxieties and psychological problems, difficulties and frustration acceptance subsidiary, seems not only manageable, but trivial.

This trip takes you imagine that starting may be the outer edges of attachment parenting. "Children who describe conditions that are alien to their parents," says this concise and tenacious investigation, "they are deaf or dwarf, but who have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or severe multiple disabilities are miracles but who are the people that are designed in a rape or offenses, but transgender "

• Each group is given a chapter itself. And each chapter - as a series of separate books - is a dozen stories about how children in particular, challenged their parents and the author with what we know about life and love. If this makes the book disgusting or operator, or a large scale memory misery, does not feel like that at all. Solomon is never explicit teaching speaking with families, and ignoring its name comes constantly before the courts. Instead, the details often painful, sometimes triumphant, sometimes unbearable, always deeply human stories with care and empathy, and sometimes lights with political and historical contexts urgent saying there. Solomon asked, compulsively, over 300 families in the book, and eventually, he says, with 40,000 pages of notes. It is amusing to read some of the distance that looks like distillation, concentrated piece of intelligence, but it is, however, its effect.
• If Solomon thesis, which is in front of the book. "No," he said, "there is nothing like playing." As much as we'd like to believe otherwise, the undisputed chapters argue that our children are the most important to us always different than they are similar. Not normal in these pages, let alone beyond. "All children are surprised their parents," said Solomon. He motioned to count the ways, and compels us to do the same.

Since this act of collaborative research and learning works of accumulation, which makes the book a disservice to isolate a particular child or family. They are, in no particular order, Kreditanstalt irrepressible Harry, "campaigners among the most important of the dwarf community," which is "gay, almost deaf, incontinent and often the only child of Holocaust survivors," Clinton Brown III, born with a rare disease called diastrophic dysplasia, a "luxury package disability", which includes the absence of joints in the hands or legs, and, if applicable, a great heart and courage, a handful of 30,000 children born as a result of rape in the United States each year, and mothers who learn to love them. Solomon is not the hierarchy of suffering or difference, even if the book is a good antidote the "whiners", with whom he understands. Neither you still love awards - among families would most like to have increased, according to him, is Dylan Klebold, one of the murderers of Columbine High School, which parents, Tom and Sue, live in their "private Oresteia" still in the house where he lived, and who have found a way to love and forgive his son to live each day with the horror perpetrated without clear reason: "I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had not been born," says Sue Klebold. "But I think it would have been better for me."

far from the tree
not a self-help manual, although it is difficult to read and count your blessings. Throughout the crowd of families, parents have strategy beyond tenacious patience and great hope, is more viable than others. The real tragedies seem to fall on the people who see no way to prove it. The oldest mother whose daughter is a cheerleader who gives his youngest daughter, a dwarf, "because [she] was not going to be a cheerleader in Westchester could not love ". Otherwise, "all parents are torn and error" Solomon writes at one point. "Being hurt by those you love is horrible, but it's not bad if you know they mean to help you." Whether gifted or slow to learn, helplessness or disorders ", which grows children can turn, do not push against them can also be productive. " As the father of Leonard Bernstein, when asked why he was opposed to the career of his gifted son, replied: "How did I know it would be Leonard Bernstein?"

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