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We’re All the Same, Only Different


by Kathleen Noonan

Readers often email and ask what’s the best book I’ve read this year. Doing an end-of-financial-year reading audit, what surfaces is a fine 12 months of reading — with titles such as the panache-packed Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli and Me by Patricia Volk; rereading Kenneth Cook’s 1961 Australian classic Wake in Fright; and James Salter’s new slow-burn of longing, All That Is. Yet, one book stands out. Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search For Identity, is monumental and filled with beauty and compassion… Over a decade, Solomon interviewed more than 300 families. In more than 700 pages you get to know families with children affected by a spectrum of cognitive, physical or psychological differences. It is gripping and breath-taking storytelling. It should be required reading for teachers, politicians, policymakers and parents. In fact, anyone.

(To read the full review, please visit the Courier Mail website.)