"The Noonday Demon is a book of...remarkable scope, depth, breadth and vitality.... It is one of those rare volumes that deserve the adjective "definitive." It combines powerfully felt personal experience with a tremendous sense of intellectual discovery. It is open-minded, critically informed and poetic at the same time, and despite the nature of its subject it is written with far too much élan and elegance ever to become depressing itself....One of the many virtues of Mr. Solomon's work - perhaps its most important virtue - is its fearlessness. Having intimate knowledge of the noonday demon, he is open-minded and full of compassion, but he is also not afraid to pass judgments. His book is fabulously rich, informed by science, literature, moral philosophy and above all by his own determination to see his subject whole, not to avoid any topic, any idea, any conclusion, as long as it brings him and us closer to the truth."
– Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, June 27, 2001

"The Noonday Demon is an amazingly rich and absorbing work that deals with depression on many levels of perception. In its flow of insights and its scope-encompassing not only the author's own ordeal but also keen inquiries into the biological, social, and political aspects of the illness-The Noonday Demon has achieved a level of authority that should assure its place among the few indispensable works on depression."
– William Styron, author of Darkness Visible and Sophie's Choice

"The Noonday Demon is an eloquent, harrowing account of melancholy and dread. It informs deeply, in every manner-personal, scientific, historical, and political-about the roots, experience, and treatment of clinical depression. It is an important book about suffering, but an even more important one about hope."
– Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of An Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast

"A brilliant, kaleidoscopic portrayal of the human experience of depression."
– James Watson, discoverer of DNA structure, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Double Helix

"Although Chaucer called accidie (sloth, torpor) a sin, Andrew Solomon has masterfully demonstrated that it is a part of our condition more akin to sleep than to, say, death, its sometime secret sharer."
– Gore Vidal, author of Lincoln and Myra Breckenridge

"Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon is immensely readable and should be universally useful. It is indeed an atlas of depression, sensitively chronicling the illness' characteristics, social and cultural history, modes of treatment, and prospects. What makes it remarkable is a highly individual blend of the personal and the dispassionate, the work of a benign intelligence."
– Harold Bloom, author of How to Read and Why and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

"The Noonday Demon is a landmark work for three important reasons. Emotionally, Andrew Solomon has written about the universal experience of chronic grief with an unflinching humanity and empathy; in scholarly terms, the book is so beautifully documented and widely researched that it helps to reinvigorate the dying tradition of the public intellectual; and in terms of style, The Noonday Demon is so elegantly written that it reads like a dream. Finally, for so many women, who are the more likely gender to experience lasting depression, and whose grief is so often trivialized, The Noonday Demon will be a valued sourcebook, even a lifeline."
– Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities

"Compulsively readable, harrowing, and helpful, The Noonday Demon is an act of redemption in an epidemic of sorrow."
– Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife

"The Noonday Demon is the ideal and probably definitive book on depression. It is a highly personal account of what it is like to suffer this most baffling of conditions, but it is also by turns historical, sociological, literary, and medical. There is nothing falsely consoling about this book, which is the opposite of a bromide, unless to be accompanied into melancholia by so much intelligence and understanding is a consolation in itself."
– Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty

"In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon offers us a wrenchingly candid, fascinating and exhaustive tour of one of the darker chambers of the human heart."
– Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

"Andrew Solomon's new book on the descent of melancholy is, strange as it sounds, charming, lively, intelligent and, in its diligent fascination with what turns out to be a permanent feature of the human condition, never the least bit depressing."
– Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

"As the great Flaubert discovered, it's hard to write about boring people without being boring oneself. Similarly, it's hard to write at length about depression without depressing the reader. Yet in The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon, through his candor, intellectual elegance, and ultimately his human resilience, manages to write of traumas both deep and ordinary without leaving the reader traumatized. His book is a large achievement."
– Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show

"Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon is as gripping as a thriller, and at the same time it has the seriousness and weight of a literary landmark."
– John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"The Noonday Demon is aptly subtitled "An Atlas of Depression." Andrew Solomon considers his subject from a variety of longitudes and latitudes, integrating ideas that are often seen as competing theories-from the perspectives of personal experience, historical, medical, psychological, spiritual, social, and cultural. He masterfully interweaves the many different threats that form this suffering we so blandly call "depression," resulting in a narrative that is compelling and compassionate. Solomon has the gift of being able to examine depression in its considerable darkness-with an unblinking look at its sometimes lethal agonies. His brilliance is in his capacity to consider depression in the light-to recognize that there are elements of the experience that challenge its sufferers to learn, to change, and to salvage joy wherever they may find it. Personal or professional experience with depression are not prerequisites for this book. It's a great read-for anyone."
– Martha Manning, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and author of Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

"Andrew Solomon's book is an extraordinarily honest testimony about suffering, which often touches, and is touched by, illumination."
– John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and To the Wedding

"The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it."
– W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants

"This magnificent book describes numbness with vitality, wretchedness with poetry, lovelessness with passion, fear with exuberance, slack-jawed horror with wit and tenderness... at times, Solomon's voice, calling to us from beyond the frontier, achieves a lonely rapture."
– Nicci Gerard, in a full-page review in The Observer

"Solomon's book is the latest example of a welcome trend: the attempt to bring depression, and its sufferers, out of the shadows. Solomon chose to write about depression after his own experience with the illness; unlike other authors on the subject, he is a novelist, not a scientist, and in part it is his novelist's passion and imagination that makes this book so fascinating....The book is sensibly divided with simple chapter headings: Treatments, Populations, Addiction, Suicide, and so on. His personal story, told with openness, modesty - and fine restrained emotion where his mother's death is concerned - is woven in throughout. His factual research has been zealous, as his bibliography attests; but more remarkable are the interviews he conducted with people from all walks of life, all over the world... He spoke, too, to the disadvantaged... That Solomon is able to give such people voice is admirable... Hope is the title of his final chapter: a bold and generous choice. Andrew Solomon's book is compelling wide-ranging, open-minded, useful. It is also testimony of the mind's power to overcome the most formidable of obstacles, whatever they may be: and that offers hope to us all."
– Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times, in a full-page review in The Times

"This is an exemplary text. Solomon is one of those New Yorker trained writers who can charm the peacocks onto the lawn. The investigative reporter in him overrides the easier impulse to self-dramatisation. There's an almost thrillerish pulse as he sorts through competing theories. The best one can hope for is that The Noonday Demon becomes a lodestone work."
– Ian Penman, in The Guardian

"By the end of this book you are left breathless at the author's rigour and clear-sightedness, and above all by his humanity. You cannot fail to be humbled, moved and in some way renewed by The Noonday Demon. It is at once erudite, personable and profoundly challenging."
– Melanie McGriffith, in The Evening Standard