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reviews
“Every so often, a memoir comes along that is so rich, captivating and insightful that it feels more like an epic tale than a mere account of somebody's life. The Tender Bar belongs in that category.” -Winston Salem Journal
“What a stunning memoir it is - heartfelt, overflowing with longing, topped off with joy, despair and, above all, compassion for the human condition. Moehringer creates a world that is as real as it is hilarious and tragic.” -St. Paul The Pioneer Press
“Powerful storytelling at its true story best. It's a life-changing work about a changed life, a gentle giant not to be missed.” -The Denver Post
“‘Kid's a scribbler,’ one of the regulars [at the bar] says of Moehringer, in what turns out to be a whopper of an understatement. Kid's the best memoirist of his kind since Mary Karr wrote The Liar's Club. Kid's book is a doozy.” -Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Alternately heartbreaking and hilarious. The Tender Bar begins as a celebration of a saloon, the kind that serves as refuge from life's storms. It ends as a richer, more complex story of growing up and sobering up.” -USA Today
“The Tender Bar is a beautiful, gravelly love letter to [an] amorphous father, a melancholy romance between a boy and a corner saloon that's as smoky and heart-crackling as a Sinatra 78.” -The New York Times Book Review
“Funny and touching… Moehringer made critics and readers alike punch-drunk with love over his memoir of the role models who frequented his Long Island town's rollicking pub.” -Entertainment Weekly , The Best New Talent of 2005
“Hugely entertaining and endearing. A loving and clear-eyed portrait of the sort of community that can be as ruinous as it is sustaining. The considerable achievement of The Tender Bar is in the beautifully recreated voices, tall tales and dashed dreams of all the wonderful characters who, unlike the author, never quite managed to make it out of Manhasset - or even bothered to try.” -Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Intoxicating and sobering . Emotionally engrossing, beautifully written.” -Atlanta Journal -Constitution
“Moehringer was all but born in a bar, a literary-minded joint in the town that served as the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. He deftly acknowledges his backgrounds' writerly connections, describing his journey--from fatherless urchin living in his grandfather's messy house to hard-drinking New York Times copyboy--with Dickensian grandeur and displaying good humor about his failures.” -People, Critic's Choice (four stars)
“Tart and uncloying like a good gin fizz, a generous pouring-forth of details and dialogue about social classes and the institutions that prop them up. The Tender Bar is quite simply…wunderbar!” -New York Observer
“[An] exquisite memoir… The book, by turns hilarious and poignant, evokes the fascinating characters who became the author's surrogate fathers, as well as his coming of age on a bar stool.” -Yale Alumni Magazine
“You'd have to go back a ways, maybe all the way to Joseph Mitchell, to find a writer who understands bar life as well as J.R. Moehringer. The Tender Bar will make you thirsty for that life--its camaraderie, its hilarity, its seductive, dangerous wisdom.” -Richard Russo
“This vivid, funny, poignant, compassionate, and surprising 100-proof memoir goes down easy and leaves no hangover in its wake.... Moehringer's animated portrayals of men with robust hearts, painful secrets, and rampant senses of humor, who find camaraderie and empathy in a sheltering bar, are radiant in their understanding and love.” -Speakeasy
“It would have been easy for Moehringer to drift into sentimentality about growing up fatherless. Instead, he took the hard route and wrote the heck out of the thing. Moehringer paints a portrait of his life - and the bar full of men that stepped in to do the job his father couldn't - that is vivid, alive, and painfully honest. It's also pretty darned funny.” -American Way
“Funny, honest, and insightful, The Tender Bar finds universal themes in an unusual upbringing.” -Booklist , starred review
“A memoir about coming of age in, of all unlikely places, a great American bar. Blessedly, Moehringer's story is both joyous and triumphant.” -David Halberstam
“A straight-up account of masculinity, maturity and memory that leaves a smile on the face and an ache in the heart.” -Kirkus Reviews , starred review
“A wistful study of the character - and characters - of a Long Island bar called Dickens...in the tradition of Joseph Mitchell and Damon Runyon.” -New York Magazine
“[A] moving and evocative memoir. Moehringer imbues the place and the singular men who frequented it with a loving humanity.” -Associated Press
“Moehringer keeps you glued to your barstool until the last call.” -Time Out New York
“Throughout his memoir, Moehringer's depiction of the bar and the culture that thrives there are always vivid, and his affection for his subjects is tangible… Each person in and out of the bar is characterized deftly, so that they all appear on the page living and fully formed… An engaging delight.” -San Francisco Chronicle
“J.R. Moehringer lovingly and affectingly toasts a boyhood spent on a barstool.” -Vanity Fair
“A wonderful read. Anyone who has ever played on a tavern softball team or spent enough time at a favorite watering hole to learn the quirks of its bowling machine will raise a glass to its clear-eyed and tough sentiment.” -Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Refreshing… The author has an unerring ear for the sights, sounds, and smells of the Long Island saloon where he hung out as a lonely teenager, a floundering Yale student, and a struggling copy boy at the The New York Times .” -Best Life
“[The Tender Bar] is a success story of a man, raised by his hardworking mother, who grows up to appreciate the value of an education, the support of a network of adults and, most of all, the community that can be established with both elbows on the well-worn wooden beams of an old-fashioned bar, a public house, where all are welcome.” -The Sunday Oregonian
“Simply a wonderful book about a heaven of a life that had everything going against it except intense love worth more than all the money in the world. Everyone in it is incredibly alive, everyone shines, and every vice is transformed into something glorious. If only whiskey, the heady aroma of which floats from certain pages, gave as much pure happiness as reading this book does.” -James Salter
“Moehringer set out to write a memoir trying to explain how much he loves the bar that played such a big role in his life. He succeeded in making us love it as much as he does.” -Florida-Times Union
“A good memoir is a survivor's tale, the story of a person who has faced obstacles and made it through well enough to tell it. Moehringer's memoir, better than most, illuminates the fact that every life is a survivor's tale - we made it this far didn't we? Funny, frank, sad and bursting with life, The Tender Bar is irresistible.” -Rocky Mountain News
advance bookseller praise
“I started The Tender Bar yesterday morning and although I had about a hundred things to do, I just had to keep reading. It's a terrific memoir -- funny, poignant and amazing. Frankly, if someone told me I'd be enthralled with a memoir centered around a Long Island bar, I'd say they were wrong, but J.R. Moehringer drew me in and made me want to know everything about him, his family and all the fabulous characters.” -Elaine Petrocelli, Book Passage
“The Tender Bar, but it's truly a wonderful book, novelistic and heartfelt. Unlike most memoirs, I really really want to know about JR, his mother, his Uncle Charlie, his growing up, his future. It is SO well written and put together, and the voice-- I love how his narrative voice changes as he grows up, his perceptions, his level of innocence is spot on to his age. What a story. Take away ‘Memoir’ so booksellers will (mis)shelve it in either or both places and get twice the readership!” -Alaine L. Borgias, Village Books
“I simply loved it. I grew up in a small southern town where the bar, Cadillacs, was the central pulse of the community. I had a grandfather who died from liver complications from his drinking habits and my family glossed all of those years over. When I reached 18 and started hanging in Cadillac's I met all of his old drinking buddies and got to know a little bit of what made ole Benjamin Franklin Morris tick. Anyway, the thing about this memoir that kept the flow and made the story was partly because the book was not just a memoir, but a history, a family history, a town history, and history of a place that brought it all together. JR is an amazing storyteller! It reads like a great novel, but when you finish it you get to bring out the map, go on websites and search out this place!” -Donna Kane, Powell's, Portland
“From the opening chapter I was engaged in J. R. Moehringer's tale of growing up in Manhasset. I too know what it is like to experience tavern life from an early age, maybe that is why the portions set inside Dickens were some of my favorite sections of this memoir. The entire book is so well written, you feel as if J. R. is sitting across from you in a booth sharing his story with only you. It is not just the milestones in his life that are memorable to read about, the everyday life on Long Island and Arizona as he is growing up is told with warmth and meaning. Once into the book I forgot that this story is being told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. I actually began to wonder if J. R. was going to become a successful newspaper reporter. As he aged in his story, so did I. I found myself smiling a lot and even chuckling out loud, but never once did I feel pity for him. In my mind he was always a survivor, always strong enough to face the next hurdle. His retelling of the events of September 11 brought tears to my eyes. This is one of the best memoirs I have read in a long time; no fame, glory, celebrity, just an ordinary guy growing up in ordinary America. Praises to J. R. Moehringer.” -Dan Radovich, Books-A-Million, bookseller
“JR's narrative is like a river. The current sweeps you up and carries you along past wild events and rich characters. It is a very human book, and you can't help but recognize pieces of yourself and people you know in each and every person involved in JR's life. I wanted to shout, "I KNOW THESE GUYS!" More importantly, I wanted to know these guys. And, like old friends never seen, I will look back at this book with a bit of nostalgia, a lot of warmth, and a longing for that moment when I first opened The Tender Bar.” -Paul Haskins, Village Books
“Pulitzer prize winning journalist Moehringer's coming of age in a bar memoir is honest, funny, sad, brilliant and revealing. His cast of characters are so vivid and flawed that they have to be real, his writing a gift.” -Cathy Langer, The Tattered Cover
“The Tender Bar is so good. This remarkable memoir deserves a vast readership … The sense of community expressed, the colorful lives recorded, and the recognition I saw in the life of this young boy/man trying to find a place in the world resonated deeply with me.” -Mitchell Kaplan, Books and Books
“I read The Tender Bar while I was on vacation last week and I am curious to meet him. Very moving story and another testament that intelligence is the best tool in conquering adversity.” -Patricia Bostelman, Barnes & Noble
“The rain on Sat. provided a great excuse to read Moehringer's book which I found fascinating. He's a great raconteur and an accomplished writer! I'll recommend it to Booksense for certain.” -Margot Lidell, Shakespeare & Co
“A few months ago you sent me the greatest card letting me know that you'd moved from Harper over to Hyperion, and that you had a great book to recommend. The Tender Bar. I put the spiral bound galley in my stack of "to-be-reads." Well, I finally got around to reading it a few weeks ago, and thought it was fantastic!! A great coming of age story: difficult, wrought, well-written, and at times triumphant. The literary-ness added a smartness to the book that was unexpected and completely satisfying. I know you were doing your job in promoting it, but thank you! It was such an enjoyable read, and I will definitely pass it on to my coworkers here at DIESEL so that they can get behind it as well.” -Hannah Cox, DIESEL Bookstore
“You dared me not to love The Tender Bar as much as you. Well, you win. I am astonished at how good it is. Blown away. I can't put it down. I can't figure out how he achieves his effects -- how he makes you care so much about the characters.” -Nick DiMartino, University Bookstore
“This funny and emotional book is the story of a fatherless boy growing up in Manhasset, Long Island. Amidst a sea of troubled relatives, he latches onto his Uncle Charlie, and Uncle Charlie's relationship with the men and the milieu of a local bar. Moehringer details both the experience of feeling like an outsider and the seductive camaraderie of bars and alcohol with heart, clarity and humor. A great read!” -Carol Schneck, Schuler Books and Music
“Turning the last page of J. R. Moehringer's memoir, I wanted to go to the phone and call him to say, "I'll miss you! Way to go! Let me know what happens next!" For he opens himself so totally to the reader that I do, indeed, care about him, and deeply appreciate the life he shares in this poetic telling of his growing up, not just into adulthood but beyond, and mainly at the long, wooden bar of his beloved neighborhood pub. The men there love and nurture him as their own, and he returns the love in this tribute. A more perfect book club selection I can't imagine, and I can't wait to put it into readers' hands.” -Cheryl McKeon, Third Place Books
