A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life is both a personal memoir and a portrait of a time and place. Growing up in an Irish immigrant family in 1930s Brooklyn, Hamill captures the texture of daily life in a city shaped by hardship, resilience, and community. The book moves beyond the story of one man’s struggle with alcohol to offer a wider glimpse of American urban life across the Depression, wartime, and postwar years. What makes the memoir so compelling is Hamill’s candor. He recounts choices and episodes he is not proud of with a reporter’s clarity, never dressing them up but never excusing them either. That unflinching honesty makes his eventual break with alcohol feel earned rather than dramatized, an epiphany grounded in the rhythms of real life. The prose is straightforward yet evocative, drawing the reader into both the intimate details of Hamill’s coming-of-age and the broader sweep of history. In the end, A Drinking Life is not only the story of one man’s reckoning but also a reminde...