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The Reckoning

Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer

About The Book

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).

About The Author

Photograph (c) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

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.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (May 26, 2014)
  • Length: 30 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781476793146

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Raves and Reviews

“Solomon is a storyteller of great intimacy and ease…He approaches each family’s story thoughtfully, respectfully…Bringing together their voices, Solomon creates something of enduring warmth and beauty: a quilt, a choir.”

– Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“Solomon has an extraordinary gift for finding his way into the relatively hermetic communities that form around conditions…and gaining the confidence of the natives.”

– Lev Grossman, TIME

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