A Drinking Life

January 17, 1994
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.

January 1, 1994
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"

December 15, 1993
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! ((Reviewed Dec. 15, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)