Depression and Anxiety, Examined

Andrew Solomon is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, and a regular contributor to the New Yorker, NPR, and the New York Times magazine. He is the author of Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years; the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity; and The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost. He has also written a novel, A Stone Boat. The Noonday Demon; An Atlas of Depression (Scribner), won the 2001 National Book Award, and was was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope.

Scott Stossel is the editor of the Atlantic and the author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. His articles and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times, and many other publications. His most recent book My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind (Vintage) has been named a Washington Post Notable Book and a Seattle Times Best Book of the Year. Drawing on his own longstanding battle with anxiety, Stossel presents a moving and revelatory account of a condition that affects some 40 million Americans. Revealing anxiety's myriad manifestations and the anguish it causes, he also surveys the countless psychotherapies, medications, and often outlandish treatments that have been developed to relieve it.