Olivia Clare Friedman's Here Lies provides a poignant portrait of the way grief can bring people together, uniting even strangers through a common pain and commitment to keep memories alive.
(Image credit: Grove Press)
UnCovered review by Stephanie Baker, ACLS IT
Subscribing to belief that the book is always better than the movie, I set out to read J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar before watching the Netflix adaption.
Typically, I’m not a reader of non-fiction and biographies. I like to say there is “too much real world in my real world.” I read to escape. However, as a bartender for 20 years, The Tender Bar called to me. Moehringer’s memoir reads like a novel much like Steinbach’s Travels with Charlie and Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast and, like Steinbeck and Hemmingway, he too had his roots in journalism.
Moehringer perfectly captures the free flow, stream-of-conscience, and wit of bar banter in his writing style as he records the patrons’ exchanges on relationships, sports, politics, and great literature. One of my favorite scenes is when J.R. walks into his beloved neighborhood bar for the first time as legal drinking age. He must decide on his “drink.” Will it be vodka, gin, whisky, scotch, bourbon? His decision is more then what will sit in the glass in front of him. It will tell people who he is and set the tone for night to come. While the existential contemplations and discussions that occur in the bar may, for some, seem incongruous to the setting, these are the parts of the book that rang the most true to me.
Ultimately, the book is more than just about a bar. It follows the path of a boy as he shapes himself into a man. And, in the absence of a traditional father figure, how he forms his identity dissecting the qualities and characteristics of the men around him. Moehringer lives, and describes, his youth as an observer. While this detachment may serve him well as a journalist, it hampers his evolution into an adult. It’s not until the end, when he returns to his hometown of Manhasset in the aftermath of 9/11 and gets a clear look beyond the smoke filled bar room of his childhood, that we see his growth as a person and as a writer.
Moehringer does a lot a lot falling off of bar stools, literally and figuratively, but he makes it to “last call” standing straight up and leaving behind a cast of personalities that you may recognize and will always remember
Black feminists are some of the most astute observers and theorists of American mass culture today. Here are five books to read — not all isolated to the proverbial ivory tower.
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In Kellye Garrett's thriller, a beautiful Black reality TV star is found dead on a playground in the Bronx; the tabloid headlines and the police scream overdose, but the woman's sister is unconvinced.
(Image credit: Mulholland Books)
Alex Segura's mystery-thriller features a queer Cuban-American artist fighting against the patriarchy and dodging bullets in the desperate, male-dominated world of comics.
(Image credit: Flatiron Books)
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