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“Far From the Tree” Makes Buzzfeed’s List of 24 Best Books Of The Decade


Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner 2012)

by Paul Hamilos

“The result of 11 years of research and writing, 900 pages long, and filled with thousands of interviews with 300 families, this book is a challenge to the reader too. It is about raising children with schizophrenia and autistic children, prodigies and criminals, children with dwarfism or who are deaf, about bringing up trans boys and trans girls. It is about how having a child entails inviting a stranger into your house, and loving them no matter what. It is a terrible cliché to talk about the journey a writer goes on while writing a book, or the one taken by the reader. But with Far From the Tree, it is both appropriate, and not quite sufficient, to explain the experience as a journey. There was, for me at least, a before and an after, a world in which I hadn’t read it, and one in which I had. Its scope is like that of a Russian novel, but it is the rigorous way in which Solomon applies his scientific research to the human stories he tells that makes this book a masterpiece.”

(For the complete list, please visit Buzzfeed.)