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,Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award,