cover image BEHIND BARS: The Straight-Up Tales of a Big City Bartender

BEHIND BARS: The Straight-Up Tales of a Big City Bartender

Ty Wenzel, . . St. Martin's/Dunne, $23.95 (262pp) ISBN 978-0-312-31102-5

In this self-absorbed, mildly amusing, but ultimately uninspired memoir, Wenzel offers her bona fides—a Muslim born in Turkey who moves to New York, attends fashion school, rejects the "shallow and harsh world" of working at Cosmopolitan magazine and spends a decade tending bar in a fashionable Lower East Side club. She then spends the next 250 pages recounting what she learned there, which isn't much: bartenders use sex and flirting to get more tips; a good sexy bartender in New York City can make a lot of money from tips; many movie stars and rock stars (she lists about 30 by name) are good tippers; bartenders are usually pursuing "creative endeavors"; people who drink a lot often throw up. When she isn't recounting details of her nightlife, she often mentions her novelist husband, Kurt Wenzel, but she never really says what her own creative endeavor is outside of making "enough money to stop agonizing about bills every month." And her occasional attempts at sociological insight—"The age of Starbucks has given birth to a generation of people who can't see past their own, self-magnified needs"—are inevitably and hilariously undercut by the author's staggering self-centeredness and blissfully unaware clichés ("Alcohol is a great way to soften the blows of life") deployed throughout the book. (Aug.)