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The Gift

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Pete Hamill wrote this novella immediately after he took that last drink on New Year's Eve, 1972. He wrote in A DRINKING LIFE: "The book was full of drinking and love for my father and the sweat poured out of me while I wrote. I thought of the book as my own gift to him, a declaration of his value that he could read while he was alive, and an explanation of myself to him and to me..." On leave from the Navy at Christmastime, Hamill writes of a boy becoming a man in his late teen's. He evokes the warp and woof of a Brooklyn long gone. A neighborhood where the men gathered in saloons, telling each other lies, singing Irish songs, and getting into brawls. More than that, it is a story of a son getting to really know his father on some even plane. Hamill was old enough to be in the Navy, so he was old enough to drink in his father's favorite watering holes. He finds out things he never knew but often wondered about. Directly from his father's once reticent mouth. It is a touching story. Hamill writes with grace. You'll find youself reaching back to your own coming of age.