The Tender Bar: A Memoir
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Product Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning Leader
A New York Times Bestseller
J. R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It belonged to his father, A New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. At eight years ancient, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the confront, where he establish a rousing new chorus of voices. Cops and poets, bookies and soldiers, movie stars and stumblebums, all taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood-by-committee.Amazon.com Review
“Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me,” asserts J.R. Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the tale of how and why. A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, Moehringer grew up fatherless in pub-heavy Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house jam-packed with cousins and ruled by an eccentric, unkind grandfather. Desperate for a paternal figure, he turns first to his father, a DJ whom he can only access via the radio (Moehringer calls him The Voice and pictures him as “talking smoke”). When The Voice suddenly disappears from the airwaves, Moehringer turns to his hairless Uncle Charlie, and subsequently, Uncle Charlie’s place of employment–a bar called Dickens that soon takes center stage. While Moehringer may occasionally resort to an overwrought metaphor (the footsteps of his family tree sound like “storm troopers on stilts”), his writing moves at a quick clip and his tale of a dysfunctional but tightly knit community is warmly told. “While I dread that we’re drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I judge we’re defined by what embraces us,” Moehringer says, and his tale makes us judge it. –Brangien Davis
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He questions,”Where is the bar tender?”
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The Tender Bar is very well written but as I read the book I kept adage to myself “When is he going to get to the point?” Then I realized there is really no point it is just a retrospective of J.R.’s life. To me Growing up on Long Island, going to Princeton and hanging around a bar isn’t enough of a life worth writing about and certainly not reading about. I don’t know….. I just didn’t get it.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I kept waiting for some emotion, or examination, or addiction, or something remarkable to take place. This book is about a kid who spends lots of time in a bar with lots or people who drink too much and none of whom seem to have any problems. The kid has some difficulty in determining a direction, has some difficulty in getting excellent grades, has some difficulty with romance, and has many hangovers. I did not find anywhere in which the greed in alcohol caused anything but minor hurt and one is left with the perception that his to some extent hard development years had small or no negative effect on his adulthood.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This is such a disappointing memoir! Most of the book is an account of this young Ivy Leaguer’s pathetic on-again, off-again, puppy like tryst with his college age heart throb and his “struggles” to get passing grades. Such insipid writing is not worthy of note. Are we supposed to weep over this? I had enough but I kept waiting for more. I kept reading to the end hoping that some depth might renovate. Sorry to say the book retained its shallow treatment page after page. Bring on the violins.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This guy is a skillful writer though in a way I establish depressing. He tells the tale of his broken and dysfunctional family tree to where you reflect your heart will break. He then proceeds to glom onto this bar scene where all the patrons are of a sub-Runyonesqe quality. In my view, a bar is usually filled with many troubled and addled people and this one is no exception. J.R M. trades his requisite alcoholic haze for access to the simple male camraderie of his new establish friends. Sorry to say, the galloping neurosis of the predictable client provides a dark backdrop to what appears to be a festive scene. The part that sucked me in was his like relationship with his girlfiend Sidney. I wanted him to “get the girl”, but his drinking and lack of ambition did him in. It was sad. He’s a clever woodsmith and turner of phrases which makes his book worth reading. The man has talent.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5