Our guest on StudioTulsa is author Andrew Solomon, winner of the National Book Award and National Books Critics' Circle Award, whose past books include "Far From the Tree" and "The Noonday Demon." He speaks with us about latest volume, a collection of essays entitled "Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years." It's a book that chronicles Solomon's stint in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union; his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban; his appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly pushes toward freedom; and several other places and moments marked by profound upheaval. As Steve Donoghue noted of this book for The Christian Science Monitor: "[This] is a big, sumptuous collection...of reportage and travel writing.... Solomon is foremost a keenly sympathetic observer; in every one of these reprinted pieces, he's carefully watching the everyday people on whose homes and plights he's also reporting.... But the prevailing mood is a smart, detail-oriented exuberance; this is a shrewd and generous view of the world as few people get to see it."