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  • I loved this book!! I had heard about it this spring when I went to WEMA and from one our staff members at HHS. Moehringer made me laugh out loud and cry. He wrote so well that at times I was so frustrated with him I wanted to yell at him as if I was his mother! I am so excited this book just came o ... Continue

    I loved this book!! I had heard about it this spring when I went to WEMA and from one our staff members at HHS. Moehringer made me laugh out loud and cry. He wrote so well that at times I was so frustrated with him I wanted to yell at him as if I was his mother! I am so excited this book just came out in paperback, so I can suggest it for book club. Moehringer refered to The Great Gatsby a lot as well as other classic literature which kind makes me want to re-visit those or try some out. My favorite parts...the first time J.R. went to the beach with the men and when J.R. met and got to know Bill and Bud. I am looking forward to reading this again.8/1/2006--I saw J.R.!! He looks so much better in person. He spoke at a bookstore in Milwaukee, WI. He was wonderful. He made us laugh and had some of us close to tears. I look forward to reading his articles in the L.A. Times. He called himself a "literary journalist".

    

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• ― SheReads said on Mar 5, 2007 | Add your feedback

A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a barJ .R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to his own identity. J.R.+s mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something more, something he couldn+t name. So he turned to the bar on the corner, a grand old New York saloon that was a sanctuary for all types of men-cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along the bar-including J.R.+s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; Joey D, a soft-hearted brawler; and Cager, a war hero who raised handicapping horses to an art-taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. When the time came for J.R. to leave home, the bar became a way station-from his entrance to Yale, where he floundered as a scholarship student way out of his element; to his introduction to tragic romance with a woman way out of his league; to his stint as a copy boy at the New York Times, where he was a faulty cog in a vast machine way out of his control. Through it all, the bar offered shelter from failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality-until at last the bar turned J.R. away.Riveting, moving, and achingly funny, The Tender Bar is at once an evocative portrait of one boy+s struggle to become a man, and a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys.

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