A Drinking Life

As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy a writer's tools: clarity; consciousness; memory. The author explains how alcohol slowly became part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, this book summons the mood of an America that is gone forever.