The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon
The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon
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The Noonday Demon
An Atlas Of Depression

Author: Andrew Solomon

Narrator: Andrew Solomon

Abridged: 6 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 02/01/2002


Synopsis

The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomon’s National Book Award-winning, bestselling, and transformative masterpiece on depression—“the book for a generation, elegantly written, meticulously researched, empathetic, and enlightening” (Time)—now with a major new chapter covering recently introduced and novel treatments, suicide and anti-depressants, pregnancy and depression, and much more.

The 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 as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by 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.

About Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, president of 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 Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years; the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which has won thirty additional national awards; and The Noonday Demon; An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. He has also written a novel, A Stone Boat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost. His TED talks have been viewed over ten million times. He lives in New York and London and is a dual national. For more information, visit the author’s website at AndrewSolomon.com.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeff on March 18, 2008

hands-down the best nonfiction book i've ever read, _the noonday demon_ is exhaustive in its examination of depression and mental illness, weaving the author's and others' experiences with "major depressive breakdown" with rigorous research on scientific, anthropological, evolutionary, political, ar......more

Goodreads review by Leo on June 05, 2021

Down, so down, oh! The sorrow, I could drown Overwhelming emotions, crowding my mind It gets me down, this mundane grind Like groundhog day, perpetual recurrence Day in, day out, such annoyance I'm starting with the man in the mirror, the Abyss Lose the Ego, and find my bliss Depression sucks! I suffer wit......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on February 04, 2015

A piercing, painful, and oh-so-necessary book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression examines depression through a cultural, personal, and scientific lens. Andrew Solomon, well-known for his TED Talks and his varied publications, reveals the agonizing depths of the illness as well as its progres......more

Goodreads review by Ed on June 29, 2013

Probably the best book I have read for a long time. The War and Peace of depression. A compelling, comprehensive, personal, tightly written, passionate and well researched exploration of depression in all its darkness at noon dimensions. I read it too fast in a few sittings, because I found it so co......more

Goodreads review by Tom on December 17, 2022

In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. (29) Damn. It really do be like that sometimes, tho. 3 stars. Although the research findings are starting to show their age, this one remains worth a read......more