Once in a long while we at Brainfood Audiobooks find a new title that re-defines a critical area of human knowledge and understanding. This is the case with The Noonday Demon. This production should not be confused with the unabridged production available elsewhere. Andrew Solomon's performance is critical to a full appreciation of his book. He speaks with a passion wrought from experience and makes this work essential for anyone either suffering themselves or wishing to understand this increasingly important condition.
This extraordinarily moving, shocking and eye-opening work is set to become the classic text on the subject of depression, mental illness and the way we live now, for the literary market - the book that knocks even William Styron's Darkness Visible out of the water.
Like Kay Jamison's An Unquiet Mind it digs deep and painfully into personal experience, but it also looks at the much wider picture - the historical, social, biological, chemical, pharmaceutical and medical aspects and implications of the disease - broadening the scope immeasurably.
What is crucial is that Solomon has not only experienced what he is writing about firsthand, and describes the experience from the inside terrifyingly and brilliantly, but also that he has researched every aspect of depression, from the historical treatment and study of 'melancholy' as far back as the Greeks and Romans (who believed that cauliflower was good for depression), right through to the side effects of the pharmaceutical cocktails of the present day, case histories of people in & out of mental hospitals, faith healers, the power of suggestion, as well as the implications for the future of Western society.
He also writes like a dream.
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