Hard to believe it’s the end of summer, especially with temps around here expected to top 100 again. But the days of lazy beach reads and guilt-free “it doesn’t have a thing to do with my job or my dissertation” books are just about over for many of us.<\/p>\n
T&S commenter Bill MacKinnon shares a short review of his recent reading:<\/p>\n
\n Having just finished reading this book, I cannot help but share with you the notion that some T&Sers might find it of interest for that final weekend of beach reading or other odd moments. I refer to J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar, A Memoir” (New York, Hyperion, 2006). What relevance does this book have to the readers of “Times and Seasons”? It should be directly of interest to those LDS readers seeking a reaffirmation of the wisdom of WoW, a better (albeit vicarious) understanding of several aspects non-Mormon life rarely encountered by Latter-day Saints, and what may be the best-written (yet funny) coming-of-age memoir in the English language. It also provides a glimpse into one suburban New York community that is still a mixture of the Wall Street commuters and those engaged in more gritty fields such as police work and lobstering. <\/p>\n
Moeringer is a thirtyish resident of Denver who is the “L.A. Times” Rocky Mountain regional correspondent. While earlier living in Atlanta and covering the South for the “L.A. Times” he won a Pulitzer for his series about a small, traditionally black community in Alabama undergoing change. “The Tender Bar, A Memoir” was on multiple best-seller lists for months when it came out last year. It is a sort of late twentieth-century version of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories but set on Long Island ‘s Gold Coast rather than northern Michigan or Italy. <\/p>\n
What is this book about? It is the non-fiction tale of Moeringer’s growth from age seven as a boy abandoned by his father and “taken in” by a bar — Publicans (originally named Dickens’) — where his maternal uncle was a bartender. Publicans is 146 steps from the tumultuous life in his grandparents’ home, where Moehringer lived with his single, working mother. The bar is in Manhasset, the north shore Long Island community that was home (dubbed “East Egg”) to Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby character. For the most part, the bar’s patrons are not plutocrats but rather the ethnics (mainly Irish and Italian) and fishermen who frequent the watering holes of Manhasset’s Plandome Road. Having spent six years before the mast in a highly-ethnic New York Air Guard radar squadron bivouacked in an estate hard in the lee of Manhasset and filled with Publicans’ customers in its ranks, I can attest to the keenness of Moehringer’s ear for dialogue and his first-rate feel for atmosphere and behavior. The eccentrics and characters to be found there provided a sense of community and mentoring otherwise absent in Moehringer’s life. His memoir takes the reader through his chaotic, hard-scabble upbringing in his grandparents’ home, his search for his father, his improbable admission to and passage through Yale, and his Dickensonian experience in his first post-college job as a “New York Times” copy boy. The extraordinary writing in this book’s Prologue and Epilogue (in which he gets over old-flame “Sidney,” goes west, gives up alcohol, and returns to Manhasset for some of the 50+ funerals immediately following the 9\/11 tragedy in lower Manhattan) are alone worth reading. <\/p>\n