The Tender Bar 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 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  From The New Yorker In the mid-seventies, Moehringer, aged nine, first entered Dickens, a smoky Long Island pub. Through the next decades it became, variously, his hideout, "holy place," surrogate father, and "security blanket." But, perhaps as a result of his reverence for the place-and despite his assurances that he can accurately recall drunken conversations long past-scenes there often feel contrived and mawkish. The stronger episodes in this memoir, such as an endearing series of failures while working as a Times copyboy, take place away from Dickens's hazy influence. Revering a bar had other dangers, too; Moehringer eventually becomes unhappy with his drinking habits and decides that "growing up" means "sobering up." The bar had started to seem like a "submarine trapped on the ocean floor."  Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker               See all Product description