Rugged prose and a rare attention to telling detail have long distinguished Pete Hamill's unique brand of journalism and his universally well received fiction. Twenty years after his last drink, he examines the years he spent as a full-time member of the drinking culture. The result is A Drinking Life, a stirring and exhilarating memoir float is his most personal writing to date. The eldest son of Irish immigrants, Hamill learned from his Brooklyn upbringing during the Depression and World War II that drinking was an essential part of being a man; he only had to accompany his father up the street to the warm, amber-colored world of Gallagher's bar to see that drinking was what men did. It played a crucial role in mourning the death of relatives or the loss of a job, in celebrations of all kinds, even in religion. In the navy and the world of newspapers, he learned that bonds of friendship, romance, and professional camaraderie were sealed with drink. It was later that he discovered that drink had the power to destroy those very bonds and corrode any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. It was almost too late when he left drinking behind forever. Neither sentimental nor self-righteous, this is a seasoned writer's vivid portrait of the first four decades of his life and the slow, steady way that alcohol became an essential part of that life. Along the way, he summons the mood of a time and a place gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifetime New Yorker. It is his best work yet.
Industry Reviews
Earnest memoir of Hamill's drinking days as a Brooklyn youth and young reporter. Now sober 20 years, Hamill (Tokyo Sketches, 1992, etc.) looks back on his family life in Brooklyn during the Depression and WW II, when his father Billy's drinking became a model for his own liquid career, despite a vow not to follow in dad's footsteps. As a young man in Ireland, Billy lost a leg playing soccer, but his agility as a player remained legendary as the author grew up. Alcohol, Hamill says, removed his father from any close contact with him or his mother, and the boy aged without any real models for family life. Hamill began drinking as a bonding exercise with his street buddies - but he felt apart from them anyway, was drawn to cartooning (he spells out the history of comic strips in great detail), and, later, took lessons from Burne Hogarth, writer/illustrator of the Tarzan comic strip. Hamill quit school to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, joined the Navy during the Korean War, later entered newspaper work as a rewrite man on the New York Post. Some background about the author's beloved Post and fellow reporters, editors, and columnists is included here, but this is no Front Page memoir in the manner of Ben Hecht. Hamill tells of watering holes favored by staffers; his lack of contact with his own wife and family; divorce; his entry into the celebrity life with Shirley MacLaine; travels in Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere; and of his putting down the glass forever on New Year's Eve 1972, doing it alone and without AA. Hamill's various ideas about why he drank are all welcome, but his more crushing humiliations as a drinker fail to make us squirm, while his readable, workaday, humorless style keeps this from placing among the more forceful books about alcoholism. Maybe it should have been a novel. (Kirkus Reviews)
