Word: pete
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...note vibrates, unexpectedly, in memoirs by two veteran newspaper columnists, Pete Hamill (A Drinking Life; Little, Brown; 265 pages; $21.95) and Art Buchwald (Leaving Home; Putnam; 254 pages; $22.95). Both men record bruisingly uncushioned childhoods shadowed by their families' bleak vulnerability in the Depression -- an era that still accounts for more residual haunted notes than Americans realize. Both men are New Yorkers. Buchwald is deadpan-Jewish-funny, with an underlayer of almost quizzical pain; Hamill is Irish saloon-polemical, with an exuberance undermined by a taste for boozy lyricism, machismo and occasional self-pity...
Alcohol made Pete Hamill's father just as absent as Art Buchwald's mother was. The father, Billy Hamill, who came from northern Ireland, had only one leg: he lost the other after it was brutally broken in a soccer game. When Billy came home from the saloons at night to the family's Brooklyn apartment, he would remove his artificial leg along with his trousers. Pete remembers them hanging over a chair in the bedroom and the smell of vomit. He had his first fight when a boy named Brother Foppiano taunted in a singsong, "Your...
...poem Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?, W.B. Yeats wrote (among other things) about the way that promising lives go wrong. For example: "Some have known a likely lad/ That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist/ Turn to a drunken journalist." Some have indeed. Pete Hamill is still a likely lad, too good to go on indulging the drunken journalist...
Gerry's bleak existence in prison begins with his meek, aging father (Pete Postlethwaite). The two, who were never very close before, suddenly grow dependent upon one another, venting their anger, frustrations, and love. They are clearly of two generations: While Guiseppe Conlon prays with his rosary, Gerry trips on acid. When without proper medical care, Guiseppe's heart condition becomes critical, Gerry must grow up. He does things he would never have done before: He rubs menthol on his father's chest, saves the life of a warden, and begins to cooperate with the young lawyer, Gareth Peirce (Emma...
Princeton is the aging tiger of the Ivy League. Princeton Coach Pete Carril is 43-9 against Harvard in his 26-year career and the Tiger are still top-ranked in the nation in scoring defense, allowing just 53.5 points per game...