Andrew Solomon wrote powerfully about his depression in The Noonday Demon, which won a National Book Award in 2001. He now has used his experience as the gay son of straight parents as the starting point for a vast, ambitious book that explores the gulf that lies between parents and children who are markedly different from them. Solomon is an indefatigable and gifted interviewer: he talks to the deaf, the transgendered, dwarfs, prodigies, children of rape and people who have Down syndrome, autism and schizophrenia, leading us into the sometimes odd and hermetic subcultures that have formed around these conditions. He finds in them stories of love and success, and also failure and heartbreak, that illuminate and celebrate the bravery of millions of ordinary people in dealing with and getting past difference and adversity.