Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools & Heroes, Lost Cities,Vanished Friends.. (Hardcover)

by Pete Hamill (Author) "If I'd grown up in another city, I almost certainly would have become another kind of writer..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, United States, San Pedro (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
A New York newspaper veteran of more than 30 years and a contributor to such magazines as New York, Esquire, and Vanity Fair, Pete Hamill has collected his best articles in this stunning collection illuminating his insights and his grasp of the vital issues of our times. As he puts it in Piecework's subtitle, it's "Writings on Men and Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Friends, Small Pleasures, Large Calamities, and How the Weather Was." And it's much more: evocative visits to Northern Ireland, Mexico and Vietnam; time spent with Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Madonna; and thoughts on race, drugs, and the mob.

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (January 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316341045
• ISBN-13: 978-0316341042
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,758,704 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable perspective, October 22, 2000

By	DBW (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was (Paperback)

A recurring theme in "Piecework" is that America has become a place in which people no longer seem to have the basic toughness to accept life's hardships, and must therefore heap the blame upon everyone else.

The situation is made worse, Pete Hamill says, by television, which allows people to have deep emotional experiences without "earning" them. This attitude is summed up most effectively in two essays, "Letter to a Black Friend" and the disturbing "Endgame."

When Hamill isn't shaking his head at our collective mistakes, he is shining the spotlight on individuals -- as he does in solid features on Mike Tyson and Frank Sinatra -- or examining a city gone wrong, the Miami of the 1980s. Here, and throughout you see the keen observation skills, dogged research, and common sense that made Hamill a top-flight reporter first, an insightful columnist second.

Whether or not you share Pete Hamill's old-fashioned, hard-nosed worldview, you won't be able to deny that he expresses it brilliantly here.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Words in the hand of a master craftsman, September 9, 1999

By	"gonzo519" (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was (Paperback)

Some beautiful writing--the kind of material you go back to over and over again just to see how he does it. The piece titled "Endgame" is worth the price of the book. It describes the craziness and the downward spiral of this splintered country of ours better than anything I've ever read.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Throw out your j-school textbook!, November 10, 1998

By	Jason Crane ([e-mail]) (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was (Paperback)

Here it is folks: How To Write 101. All you ever needed to know about writing columns is between these two covers, in my opinion.