WITH A NEW EPILOGUE BY THE AUTHORLike Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, The Noonday Demon digs deep into personal history, as Andrew Solomon narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonising experience of depression.

History does not repeat, but it does instruct. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. This book deals with this topic.