Mother Nature must have known what she was doing with genetic inheritance, because parents clearly prefer to raise miniature versions of themselves. But what happens when the apple falls very far from the tree? Can parents still provide the same amount of nurturing and love?

That’s the question writer Andrew Solomon asked in his new best-selling book, “Far From the Tree.” I spoke to him about his interviews with more than 300 families with parents who were raising children with a physical or emotional disability such as deafness, Down syndrome, or autism, or with extreme intellectual gifts that transformed them into prodigies.