The "New York Times" bestseller and one of the 100 Most Notable
Books of 2005. In the tradition of "This Boy's Life" and "The
Liar's Club," a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about
a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar. 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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