Summary and Reviews of The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
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  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 2005, 370 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2006, 432 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

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).

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Beyond the Book



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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Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Tender Bar, try these:

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    Sunny's Nights

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    Published 2018

    About this book

    Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer's The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it.

  • Take This Man jacket

    Take This Man

    by Brando Skyhorse

    Published 2015

    About this book

    More by this author

    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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