The Tender Bar : Now a Major Film Directed by George Clooney and Starring Ben Affleck Paperback / softback

NOW A MAJOR FILM DIRECTED BY GEORGE CLOONEY AND STARRING BEN AFFLECK'Highly entertaining . . . constructed as skilfully as a drink mixed by the author's Uncle Charlie' New York Times'Moehringer writes with a survivor's wisdom . . . The Tender Bar is a memoir, but has the texture of a novel' Sunday TelegraphIn the rich tradition of bestselling memoirs about self-invention, The Tender Bar is by turns riveting, moving, and achingly funny.

An evocative portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, it's also a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys. JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a DJ who disappeared before JR spoke his first words.

As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity.

When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner.

A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a sanctuary for all sorts of men -- cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums.

The flamboyant characters along the bar taught JR, tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee.

Torn between his love for his mother and the lure of the bar, JR forged a boyhood somewhere in the middle. When the time came to leave home, the bar became a way station -- from JR's entrance to Yale, where he floundered as a scholarship student; to Lord & Taylor, where he spent a humbling stint peddling housewares; to the New York Times, where he became a faulty cog in a vast machine.

The bar offered shelter from failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality, until at last the bar turned JR away. 'A wonderful book . . . everyone in it is incredibly alive, everyone shines, and every vice is transformed into something glorious' James SalterJ.R.

Moehringer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000, is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Moehringer is the author of the memoir The Tender Bar and the bestselling novel Sutton, and co-author of Open by Andre Agassi, Shoedog by Phil Knight and Spare by Prince Harry.