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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2005, 370 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2006, 432 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs - a classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.
J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his
father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first
word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to
hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though
J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something
faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice.
At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R.
turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus
of new voices. Cops and poets, bookies and soldiers, movie stars and
stumblebums, all sorts of men gathered in the bar to tell their stories and
forget their cares. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a
Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a
softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into
their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of
fatherhood-by-committee.
Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the
bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time
for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a
place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys—from his
grandfather's tumbledown house to the hallowed towers and spires of Yale; from
his absurd stint selling housewares at Lord & Taylor to his dream job at the
New York Times, which became a nightmare when he found himself a faulty
cog in a vast machine. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure,
rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality.
In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is
suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of
self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an
only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and
an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides
-Dylan Thomas, "Light breaks where no sun shines"
Prologue
ONE OF MANY
We went there for everything we needed. we went there when thirsty, of
course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to
celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals,
for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just
before. We went there when we didn't know what we needed, hoping someone might
tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for
someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up
there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.
My personal list of needs was long. An only child, abandoned by my father,
I needed a family, a home, and men. Especially men. I needed men as mentors,
heroes, role models, and as a kind of masculine counterweight to...
The Tender Bar is a truly gorgeous book in the tradition
of classic coming of age memoirs such as Angela's Ashes
and All Over
But The Shoutin'. If you're thinking that you can't see the
attraction in reading about a boy 'brought up' in a bar
listen to what some of the booksellers who received preview
copies say, and then read the pre-publication media reviews
at BookBrowse (which include three 'starred reviews').
..continued
Full Review
(459 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Anne Taylor Fleming
With a newspaperman's eye for detail and a novelist's gift for narrative,
J.R. Moehringer has spun a magical memoir. The Tender Bar is touching,
raucous, and irresistible. David Halberstam
A memoir about coming of age in, of all unlikely places, a great American
bar. Blessedly, Moehringer's story is both joyous and triumphant. James Salter
Simply a wonderful book about a heaven of a life that had everything going
against it except intense love worth more than all the money in the world.
Everyone in it is incredibly alive, everyone shines, and every vice is
transformed into something glorious. If only whiskey, the heady
aroma of which floats from certain pages, gave as much pure happiness as reading
this book does. Richard Russo
You'd have to go back a ways, maybe all the way to Joseph Mitchell, to
find a writer who understands bar life as well as J.R. Moehringer. The
Tender Bar will make you thirsty for that life--its camaraderie, its
hilarity, its seductive, dangerous wisdom.J.R.
Moehringer (pronounced Morier),
winner of the
Pulitzer Prize for feature
writing in 2000, is a
national correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times and a
former Niemann Fellow at Harvard
University. He lives in Denver,
Colorado.
Almost 50
Manhasset residents were killed
in the terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center. One was a
Dickens bartender, another was a
cousin of Moehringer.
As the reviewer for Publishers
Weekly so aptly put it, "Moehringer's
...
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From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brando Skyhorse comes this stunning, heartfelt memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle or The Tender Bar, the true story of a boy's turbulent childhood growing up with five stepfathers and the mother who was determined to give her son everything but the truth.
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