In the midst of writing his best-selling memoir, Pete Hamill reached out to siblings Tom and Kathleen, hoping for the answer to a lingering question from their Brooklyn childhood: In the local candy store, Foppiano's, what exactly was in the racks between the Life Savers...

Quotes about Norman Mailer, who died Saturday at age 84:"He was really the great chronicler of his time, the champion of personal reportage. His output was prodigious, his range of interests very wide, from Marilyn Monroe to Picasso to the art of graffiti to extreme...

Pete Hamill thought he'd seen it all. And then the best-selling writer thought up a character who really had.Cormac O'Connor appeared in "Forever," Hamill's best-selling 2002 novel. Cormac was killed centuries ago ... and brought back to life _ eternal life. Granted immortality, he lives...

There were books advocating the public role of Christianity and the soundness of the free market, an attack on the liberal "elite" by Laura Ingraham and a memoir by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president.The conservative works on display at BookExpo America, which ended...

Blond blue-eyed Bobby Fallon is a tough Brooklyn Irish kid with a hunger to slay dragons. His fists hit like a mule kicking downhill. When he throws a punch, a scream bellows his rage, for his world is an endless chain of enemies. The torment of Pete Hamill's hero [in "Flesh and Blood"] is an erotic passion for his mother Kate, a beautiful half-Shoshone woman of 36 with a poignant, enigmatic smile. Kate, in turn, miserably lonely at the desertion of her dashing husband Jack, transfers h...

Pete Hamill's previous novels (A Killing for Christ, The Gift) have been cogent, mannered vignettes about Brooklyn life. In Flesh and Blood, Hamill has unfortunately succumbed to the ignoble television-bred myth that the public will respond positively only to recycled pulp. However, despite its commercial obeisance, this book illuminates the author's ability to capture with stylized brio the nuances of the aching underbelly of society. That sensitivity in itself warrants a modicum of respect, ...

"Flesh and Blood" is a powerful story. For one thing, Mr. Hamill's boxing material seems unusually savvy and authentic, though it's hard to say whether this is a purely technical achievement or the result of Mr. Hamill's having thinly disguised several actual figures in the profession…. Whatever the case, the boxing passages are a good deal more sophisticated than they are in most fiction of this sort. For once we can really believe it when Caputo tells his young ch...