The Gift

Pete Hamill Never dissapoints. One beautifully told story of whats important in life. Love and Family

A Good Read for anytime of the year, but an especially good read at Christmas...A coming-of-age story that leaves you wanting more...More about the soldier telling the story, more about his family, more about the other people in the story, all of whom are interesting and well-crafted...Set in 1952 during the Korean War, this book is proof once again that good stories are ageless and timeless...A story that stays with you and gets finer with time...

Without question, the dean of living New York City Irish-American writers, Pete Hamill has enjoyed ample success as a superb journalist - the only one who ever became editor-in-chief of the city's current tabloid newspapers, The Daily News and The New York Post - and as a splendid writer of fiction and nonfiction, ranging from his celebrated memoir "A Drinking Life" and his critically acclaimed biography of Mexican painter Diego Rivera to his novels "Snow in August" and "Forever". Now, in recognition of his literary excellence and to coincide with the paperback release of his memoir "Downtown", Little, Brown has reissued "The Gift", a splendid little gem of a novel - or rather, fictionalized autobiographical memoir - which was first published back in the early 1970s. "The Gift" demonstrates all of Hamill's ample gifts for dialogue and prose, told in much of the same plain, yet lyrical, prose which characterizes his memoir "A Drinking Life". It's Christmas time 1952, and young Pete returns home on leave after attending a Navy boot camp, unsure as to whether he will be stationed in Korea during the final months of the war. He returns home in search of his girlfriend Kathleen Crowley, hoping to gain again her affection, but perhaps more importantly, to seek finally the love that is absent in his relationship with his father Billy. Fans of Pete Hamill's - and I predict, Frank McCourt's too - will treasure Hamill's eloquent prose and this timeless story of seeking love from an absent father at the most appropriate time of the year.

For over four decades, Pete Hamill has been one of America's greatest writers. He started out as a newspaperman covering the turmoil of the 1960s. But like many great newspapermen who came before him, he proved capable of crossing genres and writing bestselling novels, memoirs and screenplays. Despite covering too many wars and the great issues of our time, Hamill's ultimate beat has been New York City. He will always be associated with New York. He has written for just about every paper in the city and is the only person who worked as editor of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Last year he released a memoir entitled DOWNTOWN: MY MANHATTAN. Now, coinciding with the release of that book in paperback, Hamill has re-released his second novel, THE GIFT, first published in 1973. Long out of print, THE GIFT is a real treat for readers, especially those who are longtime Hamill fans. Both books, read together, serve as an essential guide to understanding the greatest city in the world. THE GIFT is a short autobiographical novella about a 17 1/2 year-old sailor named Pete coming home to Brooklyn in 1952 for Christmas leave after boot camp. In his wallet, as the Greyhound bus speeds north towards home through a cold rain in the middle of the night, is a picture of his first love, a girl named Kathleen. Three weeks before, he had received from Kathleen a dreaded "Dear John" letter. He needs to talk to her. Hamill writes: "The darkness of the bus was punctuated by struck matches and bright washes of light from passing cars, and I stared out at the rain-glossy roads, past the small neat towns and the clumps of dark forest, out past the neon of roadside taverns, past the blue-white glare of gas stations and the bright wilderness of those early 1952 shopping centers, to the place where Kathleen lived, getting there at 60 miles per hour. I was listening for her voice and the sound of her laughter and trying to control what was happening in my stomach as I fought off the anxious knowledge that she might not be there." Hamill has always been a teacher to the generation of writers and reporters like myself who followed him. And the reason we study him is the tough, understated way he uses words. He has the reporter's eye for detail mixed with a novelist's evocative way of capturing mood, emotion and inner turmoil. Hamill's writing manages to be both economical and personal, much like an early influence on his work, Ernest Hemingway. In THE GIFT, Hamill puts readers right into the lost world of Brooklyn 1952. "The avenue was lined with four-story tenements whose faces were marred by fire escapes: dark, hard, spiky, rectangular presences through winter nights..." And then he arrives at his Seventh Avenue home: "There were traces of dinner smells in the hall, as if you could chew the air itself. It was almost three." Pete lives in a tiny apartment with his immigrant parents and four younger brothers and one sister. And as he fears, his homeco

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.