First Loves: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Chicago's Classical Period
Review: If you know the South Side, Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, and yearn for the days of the high 1950s - beatniks, bongo drums, struggling writers, waitresses, starving grad students - this book will sate your appetite. It beautifully recreates a lost world - so lost that it has almost been forgotten. Alternately tough, lyrical, and mother-ridden, Solotaroff is a wonderful writer.

Rating:
Summary: Its Not Easy Being an Intellectual
Review: If you worked as a waiter in the Catskills you are going to love
this book. Even if you haven't you're still going to be intrigued
by Ted Solotaroff's journey towards what I might call "certified
smarts". How many of us come out of the big cities, public libraries and dysfunctional families? Somewhere there is a life of the mind that will pay the bills. Meanwhile we're stuck in a dining room wearing a funny outfit and serving food to the paying customers.
Mr. Solotaroff tells us what his journey has been like, honestly, forthrightlightly and sometimes too graphically but
always entertainingly.

Rating:
Summary: Its Not Easy Being an Intellectual
Review: If you worked as a waiter in the Catskills you are going to love
this book. Even if you haven't you're still going to be intrigued
by Ted Solotaroff's journey towards what I might call "certified
smarts". How many of us come out of the big cities, public libraries and dysfunctional families? Somewhere there is a life of the mind that will pay the bills. Meanwhile we're stuck in a dining room wearing a funny outfit and serving food to the paying customers.
Mr. Solotaroff tells us what his journey has been like, honestly, forthrightlightly and sometimes too graphically but
always entertainingly.

Rating:
Summary: He loved deeply
Review: Ted Solotaroff loved deeply, otherwise he wouldn't have spent so many years married to the madwoman Lynn, whose portrait is etched at the heart of this unsentimental memoir of a decent man, married to a terrible, neurotic woman. She had some literary pretensios herself, but did little but kvetch at him while he labored hard to help create--not only create but define--what was in the 1950s a totally new literary field--important American writing was for the first time predominantly Jewish. His great friend, Philip Roth, continues to write great novels, while some of the other fellows of the period have been forgotten save in memoirs by their friends, like this one.

But, it was a trenchant time in American writing, and one which will not soon be forgotten, even if some of the magic names seem to dwindle away even as he writes about them, all over, anew. Meanwhile Lynn goes from bad to worse, even as Solotaroff gives her at least the virtue of being extremely sexy and alluring. At times we can see why he stuck it out with her. His father, on the other hand, was a pig. There should be more books like this one, books in which we can see a literary movement being born 9and the machinery required to make one happen).