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    The Reckoning: Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer
    The Reckoning: Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer
    The Reckoning: Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer
    Ebook38 pages33 minutes

    The Reckoning: Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer

    By Andrew Solomon

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    About this ebook

    First published in The New Yorker, “Solomon tells the story of Peter Lanza, the father of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter. Read it—it’s moving, brave and just profoundly human and sad....There aren’t any answers. And that’s what makes this all so impossible, and Solomon’s journalism so essential” (Salon.com).

    “Both parents loved Adam. Neither parent imagined or wanted their child’s horrific end. This is why what Peter Lanza did by sharing his story with Andrew Solomon is so important. Lanza’s story fills important gaps in our understanding of how a beloved child became a killer—and reminds us as a society that we have an obligation to help families and children before they find themselves on irreversible paths of violence” (Time).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMay 26, 2014
    ISBN9781476793146
    The Reckoning: Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer
    Author

    Andrew Solomon

    Andrew 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. A lecturer and activist, 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, which has won thirty additional national awards; and The Noonday Demon; An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. He has also written a novel, A Stone Boat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost. His TED talks have been viewed over ten million times. He lives in New York and London and is a dual national. For more information, visit the author’s website at AndrewSolomon.com.

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      Book preview

      The Reckoning - Andrew Solomon

      Cover Page Image

      Extraordinary media coverage for The Reckoning

      WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show

      NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross

      ABC’s Katie

      NBC’s Today Show

      NBC Evening News

      CBS Evening News

      CNN

      BBC Newshour

      WSHU

      Salon

      Praise for The Reckoning

      Stunning . . . Emotionally wrenching.

      —The New York Times

      Solomon tells, for the first time, the story of Peter Lanza, the father of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter. Read it—it’s moving, brave, and just profoundly human and sad. . . . There aren’t any answers. And that’s what makes this all so impossible, and Solomon’s journalism so essential.

      —Salon.com

      Powerful and affecting.

      —The New Yorker

      Both parents loved Adam. Neither parent imagined or wanted their child’s horrific end. This is why what Peter Lanza did by sharing his story with Andrew Solomon is so important. Lanza’s story fills important gaps in our understanding of how a beloved child became a killer—and reminds us as a society that we have an obligation to help families and children before they find themselves on irreversible paths of violence.

      —Time

      By talking to Lanza, [Solomon] brings some light and empathy to a difficult topic, about which we are still reckoning with the reverberations and aftermath.

      —Flavorwire

      The lesson of Peter Lanza isn’t simply that we never know what calamity awaits our families, so we dare not tempt fate with complacency.

      —The Baltimore Sun

      Solomon . . . brings both compassion and clear-eyed reporting.

      —The Christian Science Monitor

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      Cover Page Image

      The Reckoning

      In Peter Lanza’s new house, on a secluded private road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is an attic room overflowing with shipping crates of what he calls the stuff. Since the day in December 2012 when his son Adam killed his own mother, himself, and twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, strangers from across the world have sent thousands upon thousands of letters and other keepsakes: prayer shawls, Bibles, Teddy bears,

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