num_pages: 290
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.
language: English
title: Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir
titlecomplete: Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir
genres: Memoir
ratings_count: 11
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company