The Tender Bar as an Addition to the AP Curriculum

     Yesterday, I went skiing. On the three-hour drive up to the mountain, I forgot where I was. I didn't know that I was going skiing with my cousins who I won't see for months because they're going to Sweden. I didn't know that the day that we picked was the day that the lift tickets were only ten dollars, and that it just snowed the perfect amount the night before. I was consumed. I was engrossed within a memoir that isn't. It does not recount the J.R. Moehringer's life thus far. It presses rewind and repeat.
     Never have I read a book so rhetorically sound. A work like this comes around very rarely, and I am lucky enough to be cherishing it today. I didn't even choose to read the book; Mrs. Fay said something like "Here Jimbo read this", and off I went. I was dreading the book. Everything about it seemed alien. I didn't like the look of the author, the title, really anything about it. Without reading a synopsis, I jumped right into the prologue, with my usual negative mindset of books that I don't want to read.
     In ten pages, I was hooked, reeled in, salted, and served. I have never read (or at least taken notice of) a book so rhetorically rich. A line I found particularly exciting was "Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret," (Moehringer 7). This was the first great example I came across. All of a sudden, as I was reading an unexceptional introduction, I was hit with a perfect line. The word "marinating" is so expertly placed that I had to stop reading to appreciate its value. As I carry on reading, the word continues to present its true meaning to the reader. Dickens, Moehringer's favorite bar, is a tool for outlining the true definition of the verb "marinate" because of its people, its relax at all costs attitude, and its atmosphere. The air was described as the color of beer. There are countless amounts of examples of words that can describe everything in this book. That is the way Moehringer writes: he tells the hideous truth beautifully.
     Mrs. Fay, I feel that I have learned more in the first 113 pages of J.R. Moehringer's The Tender Bar that in any other piece of literature we've read in class. For next year's class, I would recommend one memoir of the student's choice and The Tender Bar. Your job will become one billion times easier and your students will be handed fives on the AP exam, I guarantee it (that is not a guarantee). The moral of the story is that everyone should read this book, and I cannot wait until the sweet end.

Edit: This book just made me tear up, right here in the middle of history class. I have strong doubts that this will ever happen again as I didn't imagine it possible to begin with. This shows just how spectacular the book is, and I implore you to experience it.