Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Solomon interviewed over three hundred families whose children differ profoundly from their parents: deaf children, dwarf children, children conceived in rape, child prodigies, children with Down syndrome or autism or schizophrenia. The book took eleven years. Its argument is that difference is not deficiency, and that love can grow precisely where we least expected to find it.
Seven hundred pages of text, ten case-study chapters, one thesis applied to all of them, and you feel the template by chapter four: meet families, survey the science, complicate, repeat. Stretching 'horizontal identity' to cover prodigies and the children of rape alongside deafness strains the frame past usefulness. Solomon's own memoir keeps intruding, and the book is a shelf, not a read.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
