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. 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 fathering-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. 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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