* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * * WINNER of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Books for a Better Life Award * The New York Times Book Review ’s 10 Best Books of the Year * This masterpiece by the National Book Award–winning author of The Noonday Demon features stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so—“a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity” ( People ). Solomon’s startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter. All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges. Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.

Is infantile autism (also known as Kanner autism) really characterized by a mental deficiency associated with a lack of empathy and repetitive behaviors that prevent interaction with the environment? Far from clichés and preconceived ideas, this edition of Leo Kanner's work by Dr. Kevin Rebecchi, PhD reveals a text that is still relevant today, almost 50 years after it was written! It reveals a text describing, in a clinical context, several cases of autistic girls and boys, with commentary in an afterword providing a better grasp of the issues and perspectives relating to the questions and problems of autism and neurodiversity.

Daughter of Narcissus by Lady Colin Campbell is a stunning analysis and revelatory memoir of her own dysfunctional family positioned at the heart of upper class Jamaican society from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. Addressing the extreme narcissistic personality disorder of her mother, Georgie Campbell s latest book is both a personal, individual record and a penetrating study of this psychological disorder and how it affects and scars all members of the immediate family. Departing from her former studies of contemporary high society, Georgie Campbell has turned her intelligence and insight onto her own past, exposing the emotional truth beneath her family façade of class and privilege. The book interweaves private memories of her mother s destructive behaviour with a detailed analysis of the underlying realities and fantasies of the narcissistic personality. With disarming clarity and hard learnt wisdom, she shows us what motivates the behaviour sof the narcissistic female as she plots and schemes, destructively setting father against children, sibling against sibling and grand-parent against grand-child. The depth of her work can be seen in her inclusion of recent scientific/medial research on the subject, the extensive bibliography and her endorsement by the eminent Dr Anna Brocklebank, who has practised psychiatry and is the legal and medical adviser to the renowned Institute of Clinical Hypnosis. In addition the author interconnects the sociological, political and personal in startling ways. As she covers the end of the British Colonial Age and the rise of a new liberated generation in the 1960s and 1970s, she reveals how these cultural movements impinge on the dynamics and desires within the family Set against a backdrop of wealth and privilege, concealing the destructive and shocking behaviour of the disordered personality, Daughter of Narcissus is disarmingly honest, informed and sometimes disturbing. This compulsive book is not only a fascinating history of one socially prominent international family, but also a uniquely detailed study of narcissism, its manifestations and effects and how to survive them in order to lead a purposeful and affirming life.

Through the evaluation and integration of developmental theories, this volume proposes a new structural/behavioral model of development. Dr. Horowitz's model helps account for both the behavioral development of children (with extensions across the life-span) and for the universal and non-universal characteristics in human behavioral development. Exploring Developmental Theories also sheds a new and different light on the nature- nurture or heredity-environment controversy and on the topic of continuity and discontinuity in development. Exploring Developmental Theories: *examines the concepts of stage, structure, and systems; organismic theory; and general system theory; *analyzes open and closed systems as well as organismic and mechanistic world views; *integrates the concepts associated with organismic and mechanist world views; *examines learning mechanisms and processes that foster the acquisition of behavior, and *discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Gessel, Piaget, and behaviorism in accounting for behavioral development.

This book presents a new perspective on the development of theory of mind based on an integration of empirical research that has been conducted on autism and William's syndrome.