Piecework

January 1, 1996
Hamill (A Drinking Life) reminds us that ``if reporters stick around long enough they learn that the guilty are sometimes innocent and the innocent probably have an angle,'' and so in this collection of his previously published essays, he casts a suspicious if not compassionate eye on life. He first tackles the Big Apple, and few are more eloquent in talking about the City of New York. Although he recognizes that ``Nostalgia is a treacherous emotion,'' there is plenty of it here, as he gives the reader wonderful reminiscences of Greenwich Village in the '50s and '60s; shows how the lack of jobs has caused the welfare state to explode (he points out that there are 1.3 million New Yorkers on welfare today, compared to 150,000 in 1955); laments the passing of the trolley car and misses the New York that preferred stickball to crack. And although he covers the world's trouble spots from Vietnam to Beirut to Belfast, the sustenance of this collection are the biographical sketches of such diverse characters as boxer Mike Tyson, Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez, Sinatra, mobster John Gotti, General Colin Powell and Jackie Gleason. Hamill has a decided love for the rogue, and the reader may wind up liking John Gotti better than Colin Powell. Hamill finishes with thoughtful pieces that dissect his own mortality--recently, for example, he was stricken with tuberculosis. A collection that shows why Hamill is a New York literary treasure.

September 15, 1995
From stickball to Nicaragua: 25 years of a top New York Post reporter's work.

November 15, 1995
To use his own pretty phrase, Pete Hamill has been living in the "permanent present tense" of the journalist's trade since 1960. Since 1965, he's been a newspaper columnist and magazine feature writer, enjoying freedom from the "tyranny of impossible objectivity" imposed on reporters. Hamill has honored that freedom for 30 years, and this collection offers a large and incredibly diverse selection of his best work since 1970. It's a measure of Hamill's range and the worth of this book that it is impossible to capsulize its contents. The pieces are a journalistic gallimaufry: magazine essays, newspaper columns, elegies, and profiles of subjects as varied as Octavio Paz and Mike Tyson, political correctness, stickball, and Mexico and northern Ireland. Hamill is at his best, which is very, very good, on the subject he knows best: New York. "The Lost City" is a lilting lament for the city of his youth, one that still retained the capacity to be horrified. Most of his writing about the city is either melancholy or angry; melancholy about what has been lost or angry at the pervasive fear, violence, greed, and intolerance that have replaced it. "Piecework" is informative, entertaining, thought provoking, and elegantly written. ((Reviewed November 15, 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)