Synopses & Reviews
Planted between Ted and a normal boyhood was Ben Solotaroff, as hard a father to placate, defy, and finally accept as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, bullying, seductive, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man--"almost all ego and almost no conscience"--who made a success of his glass business and a wasteland of his home life. Against a crystalline view of American life in the 1930s and '40s, places its classic themes--the ambivalent love of a son for his victimized mother, the romance of post-immigrant Jews with middle America, sports and masculinity, the guilty imperatives of breaking away--and renews them with a candor Philip Roth praised as "not only a literary achievement but a considerable moral achievement as well." A reading group guide is bound into the paperback.
Synopsis
Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, is renowned editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's prize-winning account of a coming of age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed.
About the Author
Ted Solotaroff lives in East Quogue, Long Island, and in Paris