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

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.

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.

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.