A Drinking Life

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

— Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Pete Hamill has a story to tell, a good one, and doesn’t waste a word doing it.”

— Elmore Leonard

“Pete Hamill’s 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.”

— New York Times Book Review

“A Drinking Life is much more than the story of Pete Hamill and the bottle. It’s also a classic American tale of a young person’s struggle to expand his horizons without doing violence to his personal identity.”

— Entertainment Weekly

“This vibrantly written memoir is as much a recollection of Hamill’s Brooklyn childhood and his coming of age as a writer as it is the story of his alcohol abuse… He’s written this book — and lived his life — with gusto and grace, and without apology.”

— Philadelphia Inquirer

“It’s hard to change a family culture in one generation, and it’s 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.”

— Gloria Steinem

“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.”

— New York Times

“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.”

— New York Sunday Newsday

“This is an honest, thoughtful, richly detailed memoir… that belongs on the same shelf with Jack London’s John Barleycorn.”

— E. L. Doctorow

“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, let’s count our blessings with A Drinking Life.”

— Budd Schulberg

“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. Hamill’s re-creation of New York of the ’30, ’40s, and ’50s is bracingly evocative. A pleasure to read.”

— Hartford Courant

“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. It’s about growing up and growing old, working and trying to work, within the culture of drink.”

— Mike Barnicle in, the Boston Sunday Globe

“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 Hamill’s seduction by booze but about a tragic condition… Hamill’s book joins a new literature that eloquently shows a ‘drinking life’ isn’t the way to a writing life, or to any life at all.”

— Dan Wakefield in The Nation

“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.”

— Pete Dexter

“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.”

— Utne Reader

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

— Carl Hiassen

“An astonishing achievement. I can’t recall reading anyone’s memories of the earliest years of life that pulled me into them more forcefully and convincingly than Pete Hamill’s. 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.”

— Joan Ganz Cooney

“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.”

— Publishers Weekly

“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.”

— Peter Maas

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

— Louis Auchincloss

“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.”

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“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 life’s 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.”

— John Gregory Dunne

“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 — can’t in less than a chapter.”

— American Journalism Review