Love No Matter What Review Andrew Solomon Review
Warning: Andrew Solomon's new book, about the parents of children with serious medical problems, would brand the world's worst babe shower gift. From dwarfism and Downward syndrome to schizophrenia and autism, Solomon delivers a compendium of news yous don't want to expect when you lot're expecting. Although some of the conditions startle, the book is no pulp freak prove. On the contrary, Solomon forcefully showcases parents who non only aren't horrified by the differences they encounter in their offspring, just who ascent to the occasion by embracing them. In so doing, they reveal a "shimmering humanity" that speaks to our noblest impulses to nurture.
"Far From the Tree" is massively ambitious and, also, only only massive. It'south exhaustive and occasionally exhausting, only more oft inspirational near the "infinitely deep" and mysterious dearest of parents for their children. Motivated in role past his difficult experience negotiating his homosexuality, Solomon, the author of the National Volume Accolade-winning book on low "The Noonday Demon," spent a decade interviewing more than than 300 families, compiling 40,000 pages of transcripts most 10 widely varied conditions. "It would accept been easier to write a book nearly five conditions," he acknowledges in his introduction. "I wanted, still, to explore the spectrum of divergence." Then he visited juvenile criminals in Minneapolis and a congenitally deaf village in Bali. He interviewed victims of horrific incest and family abuse. He spent fourth dimension with women who bore children conceived in rape and even with child prodigies — whose gifts, paradoxically, force them to face up issues like to those of children with astringent disabilities.
Solomon stresses a common dilemma: All the parents must navigate the "tension between identity and illness," or "between cure and credence." So, for instance, should a deaf child be encouraged to larn sign language and join the deaf community, or, contrarily, to learn to read lips and speak so as to ameliorate digest? Should the parents of a dwarf help their kid feel comfy with his size, or submit him to limb-lengthening operations? Are the parents of a profoundly disabled child inside their moral rights to administer growth-inhibiting medication, so they tin can nevertheless lift their "pillow affections" by hand to modify her diapers rather than having to hoist her up at adult size with an elaborate medical crane? At what indicate should parents allow their male child to wear a dress to schoolhouse or allow him to take puberty-delaying drugs, so as to make his eventual sex activity-alter surgery easier?
Often Solomon embraces finding a balanced, measured middle basis. Autism, he says, "can be mitigated by some combination of treatment and acceptance, specific to each example. It is important not to become carried away by either the impulse only to treat or the impulse only to accept." About transgender children, he notes, "Parents must decide whether such children are in a transient obsession or expressing a key identity. . . . Parents must take care non to squash their child'southward identity, nor to build it up so much that they create the truth to which they intend to respond."
Easier said than done. Much of the heartbreak in "Far From the Tree" comes from parents' struggles to go far at that oftentimes elusive balance. Every bit one adept Solomon quotes says almost schizophrenia, "When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to information technology with ane of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it. It'southward hard to know which is worse." The parents of violent criminals frequently feel guilty in contradictory ways — for having been both besides lenient with their children and besides hard on them. Over and over, we watch parents carom between hope and despair.
"Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity" by Andrew Solomon (Scribner )
A large function of the book is composed of introductory lessons on the history, scientific discipline and treatment choices of each condition. This context is necessary, merely occasionally cumbersome. Solomon is not a doc or social scientist. Experts in each field will no doubt take bones to selection with his methodology — the size of the cross-cultural cohort, for example, or the heavy skewing of his samples toward people of means. The book'due south structure is a bit awkward because, despite 199 pages of bibliography and footnotes (simply "a compressed course," he reminds us, and to be constitute "at greater length online"), the overall arroyo is more journalistic than scholarly. Given the amount of material he has synthesized, Solomon might have offered more of an overarching theory about the qualities of the successful parents. Rather besides insistently he just emphasizes, and praises, their positive outlooks, their ability to play uncomplainingly the hand they're dealt.
That said, "Far From the Tree" doesn't purport to be an original work of theoretical research on family dynamics. It's more of a hybrid serial of thematically linked oral histories, the majority of which are deeply moving about the strength of parents who brandish heroic free energy and creativity. Every bit one of hundreds of examples, here is how Emily and Charles piece of work to stimulate their profoundly retarded newborn, and the kind of particular Solomon is consistently able to draw from his subjects:
"Emily sewed a quilt that had a different textile every few inches — terry cloth, velvet, AstroTurf — then that every time Jason moved he would experience a new sensation. When he was six months former, they took a behemothic roasting pan and filled it with Clot-O, twoscore packages' worth, and lowered him into information technology and so he could writhe effectually and experience the strange texture, and swallow some of it, too. They used brushes on the soles of his feet to make his toes scroll up."
The pair who most exemplify the donating, self-enlightened love that Solomon celebrates are Tom and Sue Klebold. Their son was Dylan Klebold, one of the 2 teenagers who rampaged at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., on Apr 20, 1999. The number of expressionless from that horrific event is generally listed at 13 — only the two perpetrators besides died. Tom and Sue were utterly blindsided by the effect, and had to bargain with non only their own daze and grief, only with ostracization from their Colorado community. "I tin can never determine whether information technology's worse to recall your child was hard-wired to exist like this and that you couldn't take done anything, or to think he was a practiced person and something set this off in him," Sue says. "What I've learned from being an outcast since the tragedy has given me insight into what it must accept felt like for my son to be marginalized."
Despite those hardships, the Klebolds have stayed together — and stayed in their Colorado town. As Sue reassures another adult female who has ane son in jail and another who committed suicide, "You can't appreciate or believe this now, just if you plunge deep into this, information technology will pb you to enlightenment. Information technology's not the path you lot would have chosen, only it will make y'all a better and stronger person." With this and many of the other profiles he has so assiduously collected, Solomon allows his readers to witness the "boggling clarity" of such love.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-far-from-the-tree-parents-children-and-the-search-for-identity-by-andrew-solomon/2012/11/21/099600e6-3024-11e2-9f50-0308e1e75445_story.html
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