Ever-Morphing Manhattan: ; Pete Hamill Shows How New Yorkers Experience Real Loss

Sunday Gazette-Mail › December 30, 2004

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Summary

IF New York is the capital of nostalgia, as Pete Hamill posits in the opening chapter of this gorgeously crafted new collection, then the best-selling journalist and novelist is among its greatest modern purveyors. Brooklyn-born but Manhattan-domiciled for most of his adult life, Hamill knows this turf:

"Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself. New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer notion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie."

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Ever-Morphing Manhattan: ; Pete Hamill Shows How New Yorkers Experience Real Loss

It will be fascinating to see how his publishers categorize "Downtown" on Hamill's bibliography years from now. It's not quite a travelogue. But from it future Manhattan visitors wou...

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