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Title: A Drinking Life: A Memoir by Pete Hamill ISBN: 0-316-34102-9 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.24 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: I Thought I Had Left New York!
Comment: Every time I read a book by Pete Hamill it's as if I never left New York. Here I am, once again, transported back in time to Brooklyn. It's been fourty years since I was there but after pete's latest book, who knows? Hamill vividly again paints his pictures about growing up in Brooklyn for his readers to get easily engulfed in. Putting down a Hamill book about his sorted drinking in the dumpy brooklyn bars is impossible for this reader. there were lots of credible witnesses to his insane drinking life in Brooklyn and I'm one of them. Stepping up a notch and moving his addiction to across the east river didn't stop the patterns of his compulsion and his story of those events and times will have you gripped in his clenching writing style. This book is a must for Broooklynites from the fourties through the nineties. Pete Hamill loves New York for a lot more than the bars he hung out in but they play a major role in his life and times. Then, there were the people he drank with, wrote about, fought with and equally conquered and lost. A master writer with a drinking problem taking on people, some not worth the effort, results in a very powerful book that bites and chewsat you with love and humour.
Rating: 4
Summary: From Street Tough to Beat Reporter
Comment: Pete Hamill's name should be familiar to everyone in the New York area: in addition to rubbing shoulders and bending elbows with New York City's elite, his celebrated articles in the NY Post eventually landed him the highly coveted job of editor. In A Drinking Life, Hamill recounts the story of his life, with a particular emphasis on his childhood in Brooklyn. The son of a heavy-drinking, one-legged, Irish immigrant, Hamill lost his innocence early and found refuge drawing his own comic books and playing the street tough. This dichotomy seems to follow him throughout his life: on the one hand his roots have made him a brawler, a drinker, and a swaggering toughguy; on the other, him mother's influence helped to shape a sensitive young man who couldn't stand the site of blood on the face of his street fight victims and who longed for the life of a bohemian artist in Greenwich Village. In time, Hamill leaves his drawing and illustrating behind and begins to write.
Throughout all of this, there is much drinking; however, to call this a book about alcoholism would be inaccurate. This is a memoir of a life... one to which drinking is inextricably tethered, but not one that revolves around the art of drinking. Hamill began drinking early, and then as a reporter spent most of his time in bars, and his storytelling ability leaves no doubt that he was probably the center of attention in these bars more often than not. In the end he kicks the habit, for fear that he has been peforming his life rather than living it. He still visits his old drinking haunts, but now sits there quietly with a Coke in hand.
This memoir is well told, and Hamill sees himself with a very clear eye. His voice is unarguably that of a reporter: there is very little fanfare or elaborate language, and the story of his life is always moving. Fortunately for the reader, it is an eventful life, filled with street fights in Brooklyn, mischief at camp, passionate sex with mysterious women, gunshots and jail in Mexico, and much more. The memoir genre is growing tired lately, but this is one of the books that set the craze off, and it is easy to see why.
Rating: 1
Summary: What drinking life?
Comment: Mr. Hamill has written a book about the drinking life which doesn't mention drinking. Nowhere does he talk about the experience of drinking, why he liked drinking, or any of the other issues central to a drinker's life. I'm a non-drinking alcoholic, and I find it hard from the evidence provided in this book to conclude that Mr. Hamill ever drank at all.
I suppose the answer is probably that Mr. Hamill, in order to remain sober, has repressed all that. Well, more power to him. When you know what alcoholism is like then you want every other non-drinking alcoholic to use whatever means possible to stay sober. However, what we end up with is a highly intellectualized account of Mr. Hamill's drinking life which omits the crucial factors and ends up substituting for them cheap shots at his father.
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Title: Drinking : A Love Story by Caroline Knapp ISBN: 0385315546 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 12 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Forever: A Novel by Pete Hamill ISBN: 0316735698 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Snow in August by Pete Hamill ISBN: 0446606251 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Piecework:Writings On Men and Women,fools & Heros,lost City Vanished Friends,sm Pleasure by Pete Hamill ISBN: 0316340987 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $21.99 |
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Title: The Thinking Person's Guide to Sobriety by Bert Pluymen ISBN: 0312254288 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback Pub. Date: 10 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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