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| A Drinking Life: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Pete Hamill
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.99 (€11.05)
Buy New: $2.84 (€2.24)
You Save: $11.15 (€8.81) (80%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (44 reviews)
Sales Rank: 17772
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 280
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0316341029
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5409
EAN: 9780316341028
ASIN: 0316341029
Publication Date: April 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
An acclaimed author offers an honest self-portrait of coming of age in a culture that considers drinking an essential part of becoming a man and reveals how it nearly destroyed his ability to write. Reprint. 60,000 first printing. Tour. NYT.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 A drinking life November 23, 2008
It hit closer to home than I expected. How blessed Peter Hamill is to have an "a ha " moment and release himself from this awfull curse.
Also loved the history of happennings that he experienced and shared with us.
Great read................D Bessette
Fascinating voyage through a different America August 17, 2008
Pete Hammill's biography is fascinating from our modern perspective. Seeing the life transition of the author along with the characters in his neighborhood brought that period to life for me. Strong, muscular writing that evokes his experiences in a visceral way. Terrific book.
 An Engrossing Tale June 27, 2008
I picked this book up out of desperation for something, anything to read...and I must admit that the title clinched the deal. "A Drinking Life" - I couldn't resist. Drama, angst, highs, lows...it's all right there in the title.
What I wasn't expecting was a book that depicts a time, place and way of life that has always fascinated me. One of the reasons I love "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the vivid and at the same time, faded sepia description of a New York, and an America that I never knew. I've been to New York twice, have seen touristy parts and not so touristy parts, have been at turns delighted and appalled by its residents...and of course, in that short period of time, barely scratched the surface of this city that almost defies description. Because, of course, there are so many facets to it. New York depends on the area, the time, the circumstances. One person's New York may be a polar opposite of the next person's.
Pete Hamill, in the first half of his memoir, describes the New York of Brooklyn from 1939 to 1950. In this New York, he and his Irish Catholic family struggle to better their situation. They live hand to mouth, in sometimes squalid apartments - too small for a family that keeps growing. And yet - when Hamill spends pages describing the more positive aspects of his childhood - I feel a yearning to be there. To see the far quieter and yet more greatly populated streets. I hope to hear the sounds of stickball, and radios playing jazz and swing into a summer night. I want to feel the safety and connection of a neighborhood that knows each and every member...one that shares the joy of the end of a war that they together shared the dread of.
He describes D day in a New York that had been blacked out for months fearing air raids. "...without warning, the entire skyline of New York erupted into glorious light: dazzling, glittering, throbbing in triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared. They were roaring on roofs all over Brooklyn, on streets, on bridges, the whole city roaring for light. There it was, gigantic and brilliant, the way they said it used to be: the skyline of New York. Back again. On D day, at the command of Mayor LaGuardia. And it wasn't just the skyline. Over on the left was the Statue of Liberty, glowing green from dozens of light beams, a bright red torch held high over her head. The skyline and the statue: in all those years of the war, in all those years of my life, I had never seen either of them at night. I stood there in the roar, transfixed."
He also describes his love of books, and words, and comics and the magic that happens when one is drawn into the new world of a story. When you discover a world, an existence, a universe previously unknown.
"But when we lived on Thirteenth Street, the content of the comics was driving deep into me. They filled me with secret and lurid narratives, a notion of the hero, a sense of the existence of evil. They showed me the uses of the mask, insisting that heroism was possible only when you fashioned an elaborate disguise. Most important was the lesson of the magic potion. The comics taught me, and millions of other kids, that even the weakest human being could take a drink and be magically transformed into someone smarter, bigger, braver. All you needed was the right drink."
And there it is, of course. The underlying thread of the book...drinking. From the earliest age, alcohol is everywhere in Hamill's life. In his neighborhood, in his home, even in his history - drinking is an accompaniment to all events, large and small.
When he reads Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the passage that stands out is one where Jekyll drinks the potion and is transformed in a hideous way..."I read that passage and thought of my father." Hamill is deeply influenced by his father...hating what drinking does to him at the same time he is learning that drinking is what men do.
As the book continues, some of the detail of Hamill's life is lost, certainly because (as he is first to point out) much of it was lost to him as well due to alcohol, but I also got the sense that this part of the book was rushed. It almost felt like Hamill was looking at how much had written about his early life and realizing that he'd better move things along if was ever to finish.
Still - there are passages like these that sucked me right back in. "In the summer of 1950, all of us from the Neighborhood hung out in a place on Coney Island called the Oceantide. Built on the boardwalk at Bay 22, it was a block long complex with a swimming pool, lockers, a long packed bar, and a small fenced-off area where the young men danced with the young women to a bubbling Wurlitzer jukebox. Down the block was a shop called Mary's, which sold the most fabulous hero sandwiches in New York, great thick concoctions of ham and cheese and tomatoes laced with mustard or mayonnaise, along with cases of ice cold sodas."
My mouth waters just thinking about it...I want to be there!
Finally, towards the end, Hamill comes to the realization that he's spent his whole life trying to either be exactly like or nothing like all of the influences in his life. Nothing like his father, and yet just like his father. Exactly like the comic book artists and heroes. Exactly like and nothing like his friends from the Neighborhood. Not only his life, but his writing is an imitation or rejection of that of others.
Which is summed up in the mantra he uses to quit drinking. "I will live my life, I will not perform it." There is much time and experience and emotions that he has lost - but in the end, he is able to find the strength to cut the losses.
"And I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and failures, and the things I now saw clearly, and the things I only remembered through the golden blur of drink."
Growing Up Irish in Post-War Brooklyn February 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Pete Hamill"s deeply introspective memoir of his coming of age during the late 40's and 50's in working class Brooklyn is a brutally honest account of how alcohol gets integrated into certain rights of passage as people , especially men navigate the transition to adulthood.
His story could be anyone's, except that Hamill writes in a gripping personal style that infuses each episode in his young life with a sense of urgency. The struggle to reconcile with a distant father never deteriorates into a sense of victimhood. I admired the fact that Hamill is able to describe his youthful feelings of anger toward his father without wallowing in them and always with a sense of someone seeking to understand and forgive.
This is a great book on several levels. Hamill captures a sense of the old neighborhoods of New York that have vanished and the strong influence that a sense of place had on young people of his generation when the world was quite a bit smaller.
A robust tale of liquor and literature January 20, 2008
In my quest for chronicles that detail the often entwined aspects of drink and journalism, I was delighted to discover Pete Hamill's candid tale, robust and surly - an account that carries the reader through his lushly-detailed memoirs that began in blue-collared Brooklyn. As the son of struggling Irish immigrants, Hamill grew up during the Depression with the enduring beliefs of the working-class neighborhood in which he lived -street-fights, low pay, loyalty to the neighborhood, and machismo drinking. His tale is rich with the nostalgia of days long past - marbles and stickball, Milton Caniff, Captain America, and the city Athletic League. He details his own lack of connectedness with an alcoholic father he longed to love and vowed not to imitate, only to fall prey to the same lure of the bottle.
Hamill recounts his loss-of-innocence submission to wine at eleven, along with the internalization of the street-tough attitude that shapes his life in the ensuing years. His talent for graphics and natural ability in academics often leads him to the edge of success, only to fall victim to his own self-destruction. Dreams of becoming a cartoonist are interrupted by the reality of a Navy Yard job, yet resurrected again through art lessons from Burne Hogarth, then dulled by a desire to imitate stoic drinkers like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The romantic association of absinthe and literature appeals to Hamill, a seduction that eventually draws him to a career in journalism. He details the rocks and bumps along the way - through newspaper strikes and Mexican jail. His obvious wanderlust takes him from Barcelona to Dublin, Rome to San Juan to Washington D.C., while trying to sustain a turbulent marriage, peppered with an infinite immersion into parties and booze, and eventual divorce.
In 1966, Hamill meets Shirley McLaine at a party in Rome, and he details, very briefly, the eventual celebrity life he shared with her, but shies away from giving us a paparazzi view of truly personal details. Although he denies it, he is perhaps too immersed in drink to recall the nitty gritty. In his final look inward, he describes a New Year's Eve party and his feeling "as if I were shooting the scene with a camera from across the bar...I noticed that my hand was trembling and wondered if that was in the camera shot," - his own personal play that has lasted a lifetime, one written with a bad script that he rewrites at that very moment. Kudos for him.
This is not a book that shows you how to quit drinking; rather, it is a searing, vivid account of one man's recognition of his own problem with alcohol. Despite years of succumbing to the liquor that constantly dragged him into the depths of the gutter, he emerged with a brilliant tale to tell.
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