Talks & Entertainment

Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change collects Solomon’s writings about places undergoing seismic shifts—political, cultural, and spiritual. Chronicling his stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union, his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly pushes toward freedom, and other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change.

Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities are altered when governments alter. Ranging across seven continents and twenty-five years, Far and Away takes a journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences, yet Solomon finds a common humanity wherever he travels.

Solomon is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, president of PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, NPR, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His TED talks have been viewed over ten million times. In conversation with Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination. Book signing to follow.