Alex Templeton's Reviews > Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

This week, a few days after I finished reading it, I found out that this book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. All I can say in response to this is, duh. I imagine this book will be one of the best works of nonfiction I read this year, if not for the next few years. Solomon writes about parents raising children very different than they are, children with what he terms "horizontal" identities. His chapters discuss schizophrenia, autism, Down Syndrome, criminality, transgenderism, severe disability, deafness, children of rape, and one or two other categories I'm not remembering at the moment. Tying them all together is the conflict amongst many between valuing the child's condition as an identity to be celebrated or as a disease to be eradicated. Solomon, a gay man, comes to the subject from a very personal place, and his writing is extraordinary in its compassion and even-handedness. Really, this is one of the most human books I've ever read, in that it makes me feel more connected with more communities of my shared humans. I recommend it most highly.