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Loading... The Tender Bar: A Memoirby J. R. Moehringer
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I really appreciate autobiography that reads like good fiction (or is that good fiction that reads like autobiography?). Anyway, this was a fantastic great read. And I love the wordplay in the title! (  )edzwart | Jun 15, 2009 |   I can't remember the last time a book made me laugh out loud so often and I am only about one-third of the way through. The people are so vivid and real, the suburban East-Coast setting so well drawn, that many readers will feel unexpectedly at home in Manhasset, Long Island, even if they have never set foot there. This is a story of non-traditional families, of substitutes fathers, of extended families taking care of their own the best way they know how. None of the people that formed the J. R. Moehringer's "family" was perfect--their faults are lovingly recorded and acknowledged--but each and every one of them earned his or her place in the man the boy became. I know these people that I've never met and I thank J. R. Moehringer for introducing me to all of them. ( )jmyers24 | Apr 5, 2009 | What an absolutely delightful surprise this book is. J.R. Moehringer has written a memoir of his life. He is not famous, not a celebrity....but he is such a wonderful writer that his story is gripping. He grew up in Manhasset, New York and lived with his mother, grandparents, aunt, uncle and six cousins. His father, a DJ, was only a voice on the radio. His story is one of coming of age in a bar where his uncle works, and where the men who frequent the bar become surrogate fathers and role models in unexpected ways. Highly recommended. ( )LynnB | Feb 28, 2009 | the first 1/3 or so is a bit whiny, but then the book gets a bit better. Over all i liked it.I really hate how every book published after 9/11 lets you know its published after 9/11 by devoting atleast a chapter to that subject.Despite my mothers promises that there was no hidden agenda in sending me this book, I did notice that the main character's mother was held in very high regard through out the book. The author also spends a substantial amount of time taking about realizing his potential and nonsense along those lines. Frankly, I don't enjoy reading about peoples feelings and emotions that much. (  )michaeleconomy | Jan 28, 2009 | Excellent memoir written in a fine story-telling voice. Many were the phrases that caught me saying “I wish I could write that!” One of the passages that stood out to me more for its insight Page 387 My mother’s first lie to me, caught on tape. How did she do it? With no education, n money, no prospects, how did my mother manage to look so fierce? She’d just survived my father clamping a pillow over her face until she couldn’t breathe, and lunging at her with a razor, and though she must have been relieved to escape him, she must also have been aware of what lay ahead—loneliness, money worries, the Shit House. But you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She was an inspired liar, a brilliant liar, and she was also lying to herself, which made me perceive her lies in a whole new light. I saw that we must lie to ourselves now and then, tell ourselves that we’re capable and strong, that life is good and hard work will be rewarded, and then we must try to make our lies come true. This is our work, our salvation, and this link between lying and trying was one of my mother’s many gifts to me, the truth that always lay just beneath her lies. ( )beebeereads | Nov 15, 2008 | 0.097 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0786888768, Paperback)"Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me," asserts J.R. Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the story 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 crammed 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 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 fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us," Moehringer says, and his story makes us believe it. --Brangien Davis(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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