Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #296866 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

TEARFULLY NOSTALGIC -- WONDERFULLY COMPLETE
Pete Hamill tells us about the Lion's Head saloon where he spent far too much time drinking after work. That was long ago and now far behind him. But that was already discussed in his exquisit "A Drinking Life." That's also a MUST READ. In the latter, Hamill said that drinking robbed him of his memories -- which is what a writer needs most for his craft. However, "Downtown" gives no hint of this as he takes us on a tour of his life and New York City's life. As Hamill wanders the Bowery, the Lower East Side and the rest of the territory below 14th Street, lately known as "Ground Zero, in his memory this qualifies as sacred ground.

Generally, "Downtown" contains two central themes. Hamill shares with us the power of nostalgia that he presents as the city's dominant passion. That comes after greed, anger and resistance to authority. Every generation watches its own past being demolished because New York changes so quickly. During my own young boyhood, the Brooklyn Dodgers had left town -- which soured me on baseball forever after. Then Penn Station disappeared. The little cafe where I first took my wife to dinner? Gone!

Hamill explains, "The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived in them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss." This, he argues, is what makes New Yorkers tougher. It braces them against sentimentality. Indeed, it's helped them move on following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The second of the book's two themes is the way Hamill explores all immigrant groups or buildings or artistic movements leave their traces on the city. They are never lost but become part of the "New York alloy," as he puts it. This alloy is mysterious. At times it stands for the blend of faces, accents, and emotions of which the city is composed. Other times it simply provides a way for Hamill to quickly move on to his next topic.

Hamill, a New Yorker's New Yorker, didn't start driving a car until he was 36. That's why his is a pedestrian's view of his city. Hamill's a walker and a talker, known to engage a stranger next to him simply because everyone has something to say. Like the Italian tourist he sees in Battery Park looking out at the Statue of Liberty, an architect from Bologna who knows he should sneer but simply can't. "In spite of everything, it's beautiful," he says. "Because the emotion is beautiful."

The reader can do no better than to take a tour of New York City through Pete Hamill's eyes. And if you are one of those who had grown up there then when no one is looking you may even shed a tear. Hamill's book is THAT good.