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Summary
Summary
The national best-seller A Drinking Life is a poignant memoir of a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II. The son of Irish immigrants, Pete Hamill is raised by his supportive mother, but feels overlooked by his crippled, alcoholic father. In a captivating narrative, Hamill reflects on his early experiences with alcohol and considers the personal implications of the American culture of drinking.
Author Notes
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. to Irish immigrant parents on June 24, 1935, Pete Hamill attended Mexico City College, Pratt Institute, and The School of Visual Arts before starting a career in journalism. In 1960, Hamill accepted an entry-level job at the New York Post, becoming a columnist five years later. Hamill subsequently worked as a columnist for the New York Daily News and the Village Voice.
Later working as a contributing editor at Esquire, Hamill has written articles for the New York Times magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, and Playboy magazine, among others. He is also an accomplished novelist, having written more than a dozen books, including his national best-selling memoir, A Drinking Life, and the novels Snow in August; Why Sinatra Matters; and Lost Cities, Vanished Friends.
Pete Hamill died on August 5, 2020 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hamill's autobiography entails his long odyssey to sobriety. This is not a jeremiad condemning drink, however, but a thoughtful, funny, street-smart reflection on its consequences. To understand Hamill ( Loving Women ), one must know his immigrant parents: Anne, gentle and fair; Billy, one-legged and alcoholic. The first offspring of this union--Republicans in Belfast, Democrats in Brooklyn--Hamill has a special gift for relating the events of his childhood. He recreates a time extinct, a Brooklyn of trolley cars, Dodgers, pails of beer and pals like No Toes Nocera. He recalls such adventures as the Dodgers' 1941 pennant and viewing the liner Normandie lying on its side in the Hudson River. We partake in the glory of V-J day and learn what life in Hamill's neighborhood was centered on: ``Part of being a man was to drink.'' Puberty hits him and booze helps him to overcome his sexual shyness. But Hamill's childhood ended early. After dropping out of high school he lived on his own, working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and drinking with his workmates. Wanting more, he studied art, soon meeting a nude model named Laura who was a lot different from the neighborhood girls, those ``noble defenders of the holy hymen.'' And escape was always on Hamill's mind. First it was the Navy, then Mexico, but it was always the same--drinking nights which today he can't remember. There were fist-fights and jail time in Mexico and he learned that ``drinking could be a huge fuck you to Authority.'' Back home with a job at the New York Post , he mastered his trade at the Page One bar every morning, drinking with other reporters. Much time was spent in saloons away from his wife and two daughters and he remembers the taunts of his childhood, ``Your old man's an Irish drunk!'' Then one New Year's Eve 20 years ago he noticed all the drunkenness and had his last vodka. When asked why, he said, ``I have no talent for it.'' It may be the only talent Hamill lacks. Author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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.
Booklist Review
Malt may do more than Milton to justify God's ways to man, but quaffing mead was not ex-imbiber Hamill's means to metaphysical understanding. It enabled him to defy Authority and partake in a rite of male conviviality. By the end of his boozing days, in the early 1970s, he says he felt more like a wisecracking performer than a liver of life, and so abruptly knocked off the sauce. But his is hardly a story of battling the bottle, a part of his day as natural as sunset; rather, it's another tale of growing up in Brooklyn's evening days, the era of Ebbets Field. That's a tired subject, unless it is done as well as this. Hamill recalls his passages of adolescence--from fighting to fornicating to working to trying to love his father--with an eye of practiced unsentimentality expressed in robust, exclamatory style. Maybe sinking a few drinks per diem isn't the world's best idea, but when a wizened newspaper reporter like Hamill (now editor of the New York Post) owns up to it and the troubles it begets, it makes great, gritty copy. Drink up! ~--Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal Review
Readers expecting a gossipy ``How I became a newspaper man'' autobiography won't find it in reporter-novelist Hamill's first nonfiction book. The title notwithstanding, this is also no powerful Days of Wine and Roses memoir. Hamill devotes many pages to an almost year-by-year account of his Depression and World War II Brooklyn childhood. The son of Irish immigrants, Hamill soon learns about the ``culture of drinking'' from his alcoholic father. Hamill at first seeks escape through pulp fiction and comic books (he longs to be a cartoonist), but as a teenager he gets drunk with his street pals and becomes sexually confident under booze's liberating influence. The rest of Hamill's book is a sketchy overview of his Navy years, his turbulent first marriage, his early career at the New York Post , and of course his ``drinking life.'' While a skillful writer, Hamill strangely fails to convey the true horror of alcoholism. Recommended for libraries where his novels are popular. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/93-- Wilda Wil liams, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
