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The most affecting, intelligent, important and constructive book on depression there has ever been - a key text by a New Yorker writer who has not only experienced the depths of depression but has researched every aspect of it.
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.
"Extraordinary and redeeming... A work of great charm and individuality but also of impressive scholarship"
- Evening Standard
"Few books are as powerful, as controversial or, at times, as wryly humorous... Poised to become a classic of our time: a key text for a generation that has depression at its core"
- Mail on Sunday
"Fascinating and warm-hearted... Compelling, wide-ranging, open-minded, useful, a testimony of the mind's power to overcome the most formidable obstacles and that offers hope to us all"
- The Times
