Pete Hamill

Tabloid City A Novel Pete Hamill Little, Brown: 278 pp., $26.99 There's murder and mayhem in Pete Hamill's latest novel, "Tabloid City," but the real victim in his book is the print journalism that Hamill knows and loves so well. This ticking time bomb of a novel is about the end of a form of daily storytelling in which America's big cities are like small towns — their recognizable casts of characters, dramas and moral struggles playing out on a slightly bigger, more complex stage.

Tabloid City A Novel Pete Hamill Little, Brown: 278 pp., $26.99 There's murder and mayhem in Pete Hamill's latest novel, "Tabloid City," but the real victim in his book is the print journalism that Hamill knows and loves so well. This ticking time bomb of a novel is about the end of a form of daily storytelling in which America's big cities are like small towns — their recognizable casts of characters, dramas and moral struggles playing out on a slightly bigger, more complex stage.

Late in 1969, after five years as a daily newspaper columnist in Atlanta and the reward of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, I was summoned to New York to see if I wanted to take my act to the mother of cities. Jimmy Breslin of the Herald-Tribune and Pete Hamill of the Post had been distant models for me--hard driving, hard drinking, macho street poets from the Hemingway School--and now I was being offered a chance to compete with them from Newsday out on Long Island.

FORTY years ago this week, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary. One moment he was thanking a standing-room crowd, the next he was sprawled in a hotel pantry, blood leaking from the back of his head where a .22-caliber bullet had penetrated his skull.

Pete Hamill, the New York Post's editor-icon, returned to work at the tabloid Tuesday, grinning at the cheers of his newsroom colleagues and declaring that he intended to get out a paper. "Pete! Pete! Pete!" chanted dozens of Post reporters and editors as Hamill returned to his office. "Let's go," he told the assembled staffers.

Acclaimed writer Pete Hamill, hired just nine months ago to stem a circulation slide and inject some street smarts into the city's largest tabloid, resigned Thursday as editor in chief of the Daily News, the newspaper said. Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, who had praised Hamill for his "New York savvy" when he named him in November, issued a memo to the staff that said "notwithstanding our interest in having Pete Hamill remain as editor in chief, he has decided to resign."

I just took out, to reread, the March 17, 1991, Traveling in Style magazine. My two favorite articles were "Macho Palace" by Pete Hamill (I could feel the boxing arena atmosphere around me) and "Rhapsody in Deco" by Joseph Giovannini. The background of those buildings that just melt together in the skyline now have individual meaning and I can pick out the Chrysler Building every time I see that New York skyline. So thank you. I felt I had to tell you that a section of the Times (which I don't get very often)

TOKYO SKETCHES by Pete Hamill (Kodansha International: $20; 164 pp.) In these 13 short stories, veteran New York journalist Pete Hamill does more than cross the cultural frontier between the United States and Japan; he crosses that other frontier between what the two countries are and what they used to be. A scholar who settled in Tokyo when Americans were swaggering conquerors has become a pitiable hanger-on threatened with eviction from an apartment he no longer can afford.

THE sort of person who never gets a sentimental catch in the throat isn't quite trustworthy, but then neither is the guy whose only tears are sentimental. "North River" -- Pete Hamill's 10th novel and 20th book -- flirts outrageously with that distinction but ultimately seduces us with the author's sweetly convinced nostalgia for his city, New York, in that deep Depression year of 1934 and (perhaps more consequentially) with the storytelling conventions of that era.

THE sort of person who never gets a sentimental catch in the throat isn't quite trustworthy, but then neither is the guy whose only tears are sentimental. "North River" -- Pete Hamill's 10th novel and 20th book -- flirts outrageously with that distinction but ultimately seduces us with the author's sweetly convinced nostalgia for his city, New York, in that deep Depression year of 1934 and (perhaps more consequentially) with the storytelling conventions of that era.

From "Beowulf" to "Gilgamesh," "Genji" to "The Iliad," fiction's ur-ancestors were blood-stirring picaresque tales, whose entertainments (whatever loftier purpose they may have served) invariably centered on a charismatic hero of amazing courage and virtue.

Acclaimed writer Pete Hamill, hired just nine months ago to stem a circulation slide and inject some street smarts into the city's largest tabloid, resigned Thursday as editor in chief of the Daily News, the newspaper said. Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, who had praised Hamill for his "New York savvy" when he named him in November, issued a memo to the staff that said "notwithstanding our interest in having Pete Hamill remain as editor in chief, he has decided to resign."

Exactly a half-century ago, when the victory over fascism in Europe was still fresh and the brave new world to come was only beginning to reveal itself, the United States was flush with pride and a sense of unlimited promise. It is America in 1947 where the celebrated journalist and novelist Pete Hamill sets his latest book, "Snow in August," an endearing if sometimes unsettling fairy tale in which both the nation and one remarkable young man come of age under remarkable circumstances.

Exactly a half-century ago, when the victory over fascism in Europe was still fresh and the brave new world to come was only beginning to reveal itself, the United States was flush with pride and a sense of unlimited promise. It is America in 1947 where the celebrated journalist and novelist Pete Hamill sets his latest book, "Snow in August," an endearing if sometimes unsettling fairy tale in which both the nation and one remarkable young man come of age under remarkable circumstances.

From "Beowulf" to "Gilgamesh," "Genji" to "The Iliad," fiction's ur-ancestors were blood-stirring picaresque tales, whose entertainments (whatever loftier purpose they may have served) invariably centered on a charismatic hero of amazing courage and virtue.

Exactly a half-century ago, when the victory over fascism in Europe was still fresh and the brave new world to come was only beginning to reveal itself, the United States was flush with pride and a sense of unlimited promise. It is America in 1947 where the celebrated journalist and novelist Pete Hamill sets his latest book, "Snow in August," an endearing if sometimes unsettling fairy tale in which both the nation and one remarkable young man come of age under remarkable circumstances.

Late in 1969, after five years as a daily newspaper columnist in Atlanta and the reward of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, I was summoned to New York to see if I wanted to take my act to the mother of cities. Jimmy Breslin of the Herald-Tribune and Pete Hamill of the Post had been distant models for me--hard driving, hard drinking, macho street poets from the Hemingway School--and now I was being offered a chance to compete with them from Newsday out on Long Island.

Pete Hamill, the New York Post's editor-icon, returned to work at the tabloid Tuesday, grinning at the cheers of his newsroom colleagues and declaring that he intended to get out a paper. "Pete! Pete! Pete!" chanted dozens of Post reporters and editors as Hamill returned to his office. "Let's go," he told the assembled staffers.