Electronic review copies are available.

Synopsis:

The Last Bar In NYC

Thank heaven for New York City bartenders. They satisfy your boozy thirst in a strife filled life and a good one will listen to anything on your mind when no one else will. Our barman/narrator is one of the good ones. He’s been disposed under chins and elbows and cocktail napkins and ashtrays and spilled drinks for decades in New York City for countless drinkers willing to confess anything to a bar top. From one bar stool to another our barman’s raw and soulful voice delivers a metropolitan story of good times, struggle, regret and salvation - a story put together with well-known real life places, countless celebrity faces and amazing characters only found in New York City. Maybe you live in New York or simply wondered about living there. Maybe you’ve dreamed of tending a bar or owning a bar or sitting in a bar in New York City. Maybe you’ve always wanted to meet a bartender from the prohibition era who pissed into Al Capone’s beer or a horse-betting Rabbi that can explain the world order or see Mickey Mantle fall down drunk with his face buried in a filthy barroom toilet. Maybe you’re interested in a wine and beer stained, cigarette burned oak top metamorphism that will add some hardened experience to your teetotaler life. Or maybe you just have a tiny sadistic stripe and you’d like to witness what a big city, countless smokes and lots of drugs, liquor, sex, and bearing witness to the eternal under the neon glare of Times Square can do to somebody, to anybody. From 1966 and his first job in a South Bronx bar at 4 years old opening cans of beer to shining shoes in bars across the Bronx to serving booze in iconic bars and restaurants all over Manhattan our Barman spars with the life force of New York City for fifty years until last call when he’s faced with an unforeseen betrayal and is left almost broke, without a plan and nearly a hollow man. That is until he learns to forgive and luckily realize that life without warning has just begun.

Author Bio:

Brian Michels is a native New Yorker born and raised in the Bronx. While appropriating booze in iconic bars and restaurants all over Manhattan he earned a CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies: Philosophy and Social Criticism - followed up with a Master's degree in Writing: Critical & Creative. After opening a bar in SoHo, NYC in 1998 and operating the business for nearly fifteen years he moved on to a total commitment to writing. His first novel is as much an observation of New York City's many transformations over the last five decades and its timeless bar and nightlife culture as it is about struggle with hard life lessons and difficult transformations.

My Review:

The Last Bar in NYC by Brian Michels
Was interested in reading this book because of the main location and the secrets it holds.
From the very beginning we also learn of his relatives history coming from Ireland and how that shapes his younger years and working.
Travel to places and the people he meets, things he hears, places he worked were so real as things are described in detail-author makes you feel like you were there seeing it for yourself.
Loved he was able to watch the World Trade Center being built and also swam under the GWB.
Like hearing of the connections also with baseball and library of books where he lives.
Adult situations are present. Loved learning the different jobs at the bar and what they entailed.
Loved how dedicated his passion is to having his own bar. Sad memories of watching the towers going down on my TV and highly commendable to going towards the turmoil rather than running away from it.
Didn't mind the celebrities much as I don't follow them but liked the stories that evolved form conversations at the bar. Liked philosophical bantering, kinda opened the authors soul and spirit to you to get the different angles of what he was experiencing.
Loved travel even from one block to the next because then you can trace his actual steps. Liked how he knew what patrons wanted to hear and where to be placed-like a sixth sense.
Would love to read more from this author.
I received a review copy and this is my honest review.