Summary and Reviews of The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews A reader's guide to depression, hopelessly bleak yet heartbreakingly real. In this massive tome, Solomon (A Stone Boat) confronts the terrors of depression with a breadth both panoramic and precise.

Library Journal This compassionate work that never simplifies complex matters is essential for all collections.

 Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon Andrew Solomon's new book on the descent of melancholy is, strange as it sounds, charming, lively, intelligent, and, in its diligent fascination with what turns out to be a permanent feature of the human condition, never the least bit depressing.

 Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence Andrew Solomon offers us a wrenchingly candid, fascinating, and exhaustive tour of one of the darker chambers of the human heart.

 Edmund white, author of A Boy's Own Story and Flâneur 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.

 Harold Bloom, author of How to Read and Why and Shakespeare The Invention of the Human The Noonday Demon is immensely readable and should be universally useful. It is indeed an atlas of depression, sensitively chronicling the illness's 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.

 James Watson, discoverer of DNA structure, Nobel Prize winner, and author of The Double Helix A brilliant, kaleidoscopic portrayal of the human experience of depression.

 Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine The Noonday Demon is an eloquent, harrowing account of melancholy and dread. It informs deeply in every manner -- personal, scientific, historical, and political -- about the roots, experience, and treatment of clinical depression. It is an important book about suffering, but an even more important one about hope.

 Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show Through his candor, intellectual elegance, and ultimately his human resilience, Solomon manages to write of traumas both deep and ordinary without leaving the reader traumatized.

 Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Compulsively readable, harrowing, and helpful, The Noonday Demon is an act of redemption in an epidemic of sorrow.

 Martha Manning, Ph.D. Clinical psychologist and author of Undercurrents A Life Beneath the Surface 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.

 Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities With unflinching humanity and empathy, Solomon has written a landmark work about the universal experience of chronic grief. The book is so beautifully documented and widely researched that it reinvigorates the dying tradition of the public intellectual. And for so many women who are the more likely gender to experience lasting depression, whose grief is so often trivialized, The Noonday Demon will be a valued sourcebook, even a lifeline.

 W. G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness that is on the point of becoming endemic and that, 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.

 William Styron, author of Darkness Visible and Sophie's Choice An amazingly rich and absorbing work....In its flow of insights and its scope -- encompassing not only the author's own ordeal but also keen inquiries into the biological, social, and political aspects of the illness -- The Noonday Demon has achieved a level of authority that should assure its place among the few indispensable works on depression.