Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir Book

Ted Solotaroff's memoir of growing up with his father takes on a number of time-tested themes: paternal rage, the American Jew, a boy's love for his mother, an intellectual coming of age. But as one might expect from an editor and critic as prominent as Solotaroff, it does so in language so elegant and perceptive as to make these all seem utterly fresh. Granted, he has the decidedly mixed blessing of a subject who is larger than life, a father who rages the way through these pages like a character straight out of Shakespeare. Solotaroff Senior was a tyrant, a bully, a pathological miser, the kind of man who would "take the tender part of the steak, the breast of the chicken, and then push the platter over to Mom to cut up what was left. 'Eat bread, kids,' he'd say. 'Don't fill up on meat.'" But this is hardly a '90s-style victim memoir; Solotaroff doesn't dwell on his father's physical violence, and his analysis of his father's crippling fears and jealousies is scrupulously fair--even, at times, tender. A series of equally vivid portraits round out the book: his mother, a sensitive, cultured woman who was terrorized into passivity; the aunts, uncles, and teachers who aided young Solotaroff's intellectual development and showed him that a different way of living was possible. But again and again, it's to his father that Solotaroff returns: Who was this man, who, even in death, could play my spirit like a pipe? How had the holes been put in that he'd fingered? How had I managed to keep him from breaking it, as he had tried to do? In tracing the enigma that was his father to its source, Solotaroff reveals much about America itself, its historical wounds and its possibilities for redemption. --Mary ParkRead More

from£N/A | RRP: £9.99
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £N/A
  • Product Description

    Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Truth Comes in Blows is renowned editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's prize-winning account of a coming of age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed. 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, Truth Comes in Blows 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.

  • 0393320502
  • 9780393320503
  • T Solotaroff
  • 21 June 2000
  • W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 288
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.