Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

In straightforward candor, with unflinching staccato, Hamill shows us that his fate was sealed from the moment of his birth.

Pete Hamill has a story to tell, a good one, and doesnt waste a word doing it.

Pete Hamills thirty years of writing come to fruition in A Drinking Life. It is constructed seamlessly, with the pacing and eye for telling detail learned as a novelist and the hard, spare prose of a fine journalist.

A Drinking Life is much more than the story of Pete Hamill and the bottle. Its also a classic American tale of a young persons struggle to expand his horizons without doing violence to his personal identity.

This vibrantly written memoir is as much a recollection of Hamills Brooklyn childhood and his coming of age as a writer as it is the story of his alcohol abuse Hes written this book and lived his life with gusto and grace, and without apology.

Its hard to change a family culture in one generation, and its even harder to find a writer who can take us along on this journey. In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill does both. For any men trying to become the fathers they never had, and all readers pioneering in new emotional territory, this book is a gift of honesty, courage and very good writing.

A Drinking Life is a vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-destruction. It is tough-minded, brimming with energy and unflinchingly honest. Mr. Hamill may lament what drink did to his memories, but to judge from this account he never lost the best of them.

From a vantage point of two decades later, Hamill has written not a moralistic confession but a joyously honest testament to the drinking life, to its rewards no less than to its costs, which finally became too high.

This is an honest, thoughtful, richly detailed memoir that belongs on the same shelf with Jack Londons John Barleycorn.

A Drinking Life is Pete Hamill at the top of his game, which puts him way up there with the best we have. If Scott Fitzgerald had been able to read it sixty years ago, who knows, we might have had half-a-dozen more Gatsbys and Tender Is the Nights. Meanwhile, lets count our blessings with A Drinking Life.

Sad but never maudlin, tender but unsentimental, hard-bitten yet revealing, A Drinking Life is an unblinking look back at a life molded by a time and place that no longer exist. Hamills re-creation of New York of the 30, 40s, and 50s is bracingly evocative. A pleasure to read.

An affectionate, accurate appraisal of a period the 40s and 50s when taverns were to working people what country clubs and health joints have become to so many today. Its about growing up and growing old, working and trying to work, within the culture of drink.

I felt at times during this book that I was reading my own story, and so will many others. This is not just about Pete Hamills seduction by booze but about a tragic condition Hamills book joins a new literature that eloquently shows a drinking life isnt the way to a writing life, or to any life at all.

Hamill has written an extraordinary and intimate reflection on the roots of his character and his conscience and his imagination, and Pete Hamill being who he is, that is consequential reading.

Hamill consistently defies the squeamish objectivity of American journalism by writing explicitly about what he feels. And he does it not in the detached manner of a professional observer, but in his own strong, plainspoken voice.

Pete Hamill has made a fine career of covering the news, but his own story is probably as remarkable as any other hes written. A Drinking Life is startling in its candor, detail, and insight.

An astonishing achievement. I cant recall reading anyones memories of the earliest years of life that pulled me into them more forcefully and convincingly than Pete Hamills. His choice of the particular incident, the precise moment, the exact feeling, illuminates so much about the time and place and people of his childhood and later years that it is breathtaking. He has written a beautiful book.

Hamill re-creates a time extinct, a Brooklyn of trolley cars, Dodgers, pails of beer, and pals like No Toes Nocera. This is not a jeremiad condemning drink but a thoughtful, funny, street-smart reflection on its consequences.

This moving memoir of a working-class kid coming of age simply demonstrates once again that Pete Hamill is in the first rank of American writers. It should be mandatory reading for every man (and woman), young or old.

The vivid and ultimately exhilarating account of the conquest of a dread affliction by a first-class writer.

In creating this frank, often unflattering record of his personal struggles, Hamill has gone beyond simply remembering. He has also bestowed a form of immortality upon a neighborhood that now exists only in memory, dissolved by drugs, poverty, and suburban exoduses. With straightforward, two-fisted prose that is rarely maudlin, Hamill both honors and transcends his past.

Pete Hamill evokes a New York that exists today only in memory. Read it and you feel the asphalt sticking to your shoes in a summer stickball game and the cooling shower of an open fire hydrant, remember the disappointment of options foreclosed by a cruel economic determinism, taste the blessed booze that loosens the tongue and fuels the braggadocio that seems to offer the only escape from lifes pitiless demands. Pete Hamill did escape, his virtue lost, but his humor intact, and the result is a memoir as sad and brash and funny and compelling as the city he loves.

The story is compelling; the writing is lean. Hamill the man catches Hamill the aimless adolescent with powerful prose that arrives in short, powerful bursts. He can say in a paragraph what some writers even good ones cant in less than a chapter.

NOVELS

A Killing for Christ

The Gift

Dirty Laundry

Flesh and Blood

The Deadly Piece

The Guns of Heaven

Loving Women

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Invisible City

Tokyo Sketches

JOURNALISM

Irrational Ravings

THIS IS A BOOK about my time in the drinking life. It tells the story of the way one human being became aware of alcohol, embraced it, struggled with it, was hurt by it, and finally left it behind. The tale has no hero.

The culture of drink endures because it offers so many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love. From almost the beginning of awareness, drinking was a part of my life; there is no way that I could tell the story of the drinking without telling the story of the life. Much of that story was wonderful. In the snug darkness of saloons, I learned much about being human and about mastering a craft. I had, as they say, a million laughs. But those grand times also caused great moral, physical, or psychological damage to myself and others. Some of that harm was probably permanent. There is little to be done now but take responsibility. No mans past can be changed; its a fact, like red hair.