| I just finished reading "The Tender Bar" by JR Moehringer, thanks to a member of my book club. I enjoyed it more than most I've read in the past year. What a wonderful writer he is. The book, and the author, have won awards including"Best Book of the Year by NYTimes, Pulitzer Prize, etc.
Here's a summary I stole from a Borders website:
"JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a sanctuary for all sorts of men -- cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along the bar taught JR, tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee.... In the rich tradition of bestselling memoirs about self-invention, THE TENDER BAR is by turns riveting, moving, and achingly funny. An evocative portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, it's also a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys." |