A delightful collection that will surely inspire many bar-hopping tours.
Writers share anecdotes and reminiscences about their favorite bars from around the world.
There’s no shortage of writers who’ve waxed poetic about their drinking habits, gaining notoriety, if not infamy, for pickling themselves alive. Yet what’s often overlooked is the habitat of the drunkard: the bar. Manning’s (The Things that Need Doing, 2010, etc.) well-curated collection of anecdotes, stories and sorrowful remembrances is a paean to these cathedrals of booze—the charming or surly wait staff, the choice music blaring from the jukebox and even the strict rules that define the space’s etiquette. Divided into categories separating the seedy dives from the upscale cocktail joints, the dimly lit date-night hideaways from the rowdy sawdust houses, and the bar around the corner from taverns in some of the most remote locations on Earth (imagine the inconvenience of a sudden beer shortage on the South Pacific island of Tarawa), these recollections will make even the most ardent teetotalers pine for a cold brew. Not to undermine the seriousness of alcoholism—and many of these stories hint at the perils of overconsumption—but there is true romance in the home-away-from-home feeling that comes with being a regular at one’s favorite watering hole. For the Croatian writer Robert Perisic, it was the heartbreak of losing his go-to spot by acquiescing to his wife’s demand that she have it as part of their separation. For Katy St. Clair, it was putting up with ridiculous surcharges to help preserve the Polynesian-themed Tonga Room in San Francisco. For others, it was the rite of passage of underage drinking, feeling welcome in a new country or simply the pursuit of a bespoke cocktail. Though the tales are inherently nostalgic, many of these places having long since shuttered, there is ultimately the optimism that there’s a clean, well-lighted place for each of us. Other contributors include Jack Hitt, Laura Lippman and Darin Strauss.
A delightful collection that will surely inspire many bar-hopping tours.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-936787-22-7
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Black Balloon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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