Bloomberg News Book Reviews by Edward Nawotka

McCourt's School Days, Moehringer's Boozer, War Doctor: Memoirs

(Review. Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are his own.)

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Before Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer
Prize for ``Angela's Ashes,'' he taught a creative-writing class in
a public high school in New York.

The course was so popular that one desperate mother offered to
spend a weekend with him -- sharing a bed at the resort of his
choice -- just to get her daughter admitted.

McCourt recounts this and other episodes from his 30 years as
an educator in New York in his latest memoir, ``Teacher Man''
(Scribner, 258 pages, $26; HarperCollins UK, 18.99 pounds).
On his first day at a Staten Island vocational school in 1958,
McCourt confronted ``a vista of breasts and biceps'' --the hostile
children of working-class dads who had fought in World War II. Five
schools, one community college and 33,000 classes later, he teaches
brainiacs at Manhattan's elite Stuyvesant High School how to get
into the Ivy League.

The classroom was good to McCourt. It's where he found the
irreverent, self-deprecating voice that he employs here, as in
``Angela's Ashes'' and ``'Tis.'' That charming blarney, along with
his knack for creating offbeat homework assignments -- he once
asked students to write an excuse note from Adam and Eve to God --
won over pupils and uptight school administrators alike.

Some scenes smack of every inspirational school movie ever
made. Yet McCourt regenerates the genre with his keen eye and
unfailing ear for New York argot. (``Youse don't lissena teacher,''
says one father.) Ignore the echoes of ``Goodbye, Mr. Chips.'' This
book is worth reading in its own right.

`The Tender Bar'

Like McCourt, who sought succor from school-induced stress in
the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, J.R. Moehringer has
spent plenty of time on bar stools. In fact, he wasn't old enough
to drink when he first landed on one.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times,
Moehringer grew up as the child of a single mother. He sought a
surrogate father among the denizens of Dickens, a tavern where his
Uncle Charlie tended the bar in Manhasset, Long Island. He recalls
his search in ``The Tender Bar'' (Hyperion, 368 pages, $23.95; to
be published in the U.K. next month by Hodder and Stoughton, 16.99
pounds).

Dickens was a place filled with cigarette smoke and Sinatra on
the jukebox. It was the 1970s, and the customers were mostly men
who drove Cadillacs, wore Foster Grant sunglasses and spent their
days half-lit on Vodka Gimlets.

Drinking and Carousing

While Moehringer's mother and her extended family provided
food and shelter, the tavern offered education. There, Uncle
Charlie and his sidekicks -- Colt, Bobo and Joey D -- schooled him
in the arts of drinking, carousing and skirt chasing.

The memoir follows a classic coming-of-age trajectory, tracing
Moehringer's flight out of Long Island, first to Yale and on to the
New York Times. As the book closes, he returns to the bar after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to report on the funerals of
almost 50 Manhasset dead. You'll grow so fond of the tavern that
you'll ache for the fathers Moehringer outgrew.

Jonathan Kaplan is a triage surgeon who admits to reading
``the war news like job-vacancy ads.'' He honed his skills on
battlefields in Angola, Eritrea and Mozambique. He recounts his
evolution as a doctor in his latest book, ``Contact Wounds: A War
Surgeon's Education'' (Grove, $25, 278 pages; to be published in
the U.K. this February by Picador, 17.99 pounds).

A white South African born in 1954, Kaplan was inspired by his
father, an orthopedic surgeon who served with the British army
during World War II and defied apartheid to operate on blacks back
home.

Severed Nerves

The author's wanderlust set in early. Before becoming a
doctor, he worked on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in the
Seychelles among witch doctors. As soon as he qualified to practice
medicine, he went off to a war in Angola, where 100,000 land-mine
victims offered him plenty of practice.

Though Kaplan's depictions of suffering feel uncomfortably
voyeuristic at times, his descriptions of surgical techniques are
vivid. When preparing a limb for amputation, he severed nerves so
cleanly that they ``retracted up into the flesh,'' he writes.

Kaplan's previous memoir, ``The Dressing Station,'' offered
even greater medical detail. This account is more reflective,
delving into his motives. Far from thinking he's God, Kaplan voices
doubts about his professional ``suitability.''

War gave him a sense of purpose, he says: In battle, his doubt
``vanished in the immediacy of survival.''