Book description
Like Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, The Noonday Demon digs
deep into personal history, as Andrew Solomon narrates, brilliantly
and terrifyingly, his own agonising experience of depression.
Solomon also portrays the pain of others, in different cultures and
societies whose lives have been shattered by depression and uncovers
the historical, social, biological, chemical and medical implications
of this crippling disease. He takes us through the halls of mental
hospitals where some of his subjects have been imprisoned for decades;
into the research labs; to the burdened and afflicted poor, rural and
urban. He talks to faith healers and voyages around the world in a
quest for folk wisdom. He analyses the medications of today as well as
reviewing the politics of diagnosis and treatment and, perhaps most
significantly, he looks at the vital role of will and love in the
process of recovery.
Andrew Solomon is a highly regarded academic and journalist on
politics, culture and psychology. He's lectured widely at Harvard, Yale,
Cambridge, Stanford amongst others, and writes regularly for
The New Yorker
,
Newsweek
,
Guardian
. His highly acclaimed international study of depression,
The Noonday
Demon
won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2002
Pulitzer Prize.
