Pete Hamill
Hamill in 2007
Born	(1935-06-24) June 24, 1935 (age 77) Brooklyn, New York
Occupation	Writer
www.petehamill.com

Pete Hamill (born June 24, 1935) is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime."^[1] Hamill was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and The New York Daily News.

Biography[link]

The eldest of seven children of Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pete Hamill was born in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.^[2] His father, Billy Hamill, lost a leg as the result of an injury in a semi-pro soccer game in Brooklyn.^[3] Hamill’s mother, Anne Devlin, a high school graduate in Belfast, arrived in New York on the day the stock market crashed in 1929.^[4] Billy Hamill met Anne Devlin in 1933 and they married the following year.^[5] Billy Hamill had jobs as a grocery clerk, in a war plant, and later in a factory producing lighting fixtures. Anne Hamill was employed in Wanamaker's department store, and also worked as a domestic, a nurses' aide, and a cashier in the RKO movie chain.^[6]

Hamill attended Holy Name of Jesus grammar school^[7] and delivered the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was 11.^[8] In 1949, Hamill attended the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan, but left school when he was 15 to work as an apprentice sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; 59 years later, in June 2010, Regis awarded him an honorary diploma.^[9] Inspired especially by the work of Milton Caniff, he was set on becoming a comic book artist.^[10] Hamill attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts (then called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School),^[11] with the goal of becoming a painter.^[12] In the fall of 1952, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After his discharge, in 1956-57, he was a student at Mexico City College on the G.I. Bill.^[13] Hamill has also lived in Spain, Ireland, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rome, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A friend of Robert F. Kennedy, Hamill helped persuade the senator to run for the United States presidency, then worked for the campaign and covered it as a journalist. He was one of four men who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan of his gun in the aftermath of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.^[14]

His brothers Denis and John Hamill are also writers. Denis writes for the New York Daily News.^[15] His other siblings are Joe (deceased), Brian, and Kathleen. Hamill has two daughters named Adriene and Deirdre.^[16] Hamill lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Fukiko Aoki.

Journalism[link]

Hamill began to work as a reporter for the New York Post in 1960.^[17] The 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike led Hamill to start writing magazine articles. By the fall of 1963 he was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, stationed in Europe.^[18] Hamill spent six months in Barcelona and five months in Dublin, and traveled Europe interviewing actors, movie directors, and authors, as well as ordinary citizens. In August 1964 he returned to New York, reported on the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, and was briefly employed as a feature writer at the New York Herald Tribune. He began writing a column for the New York Post in late 1965, and by the end of that year was reporting from Vietnam.^[19]

Over the course of nearly forty years Hamill worked at the Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and New York Newsday. He served briefly as editor of the Post, and later as editor-in-chief-of the Daily News. His resignation from the latter position after eight months prompted a letter of protest signed by more than a hundred of the paper’s writers.^[20] Hamill’s more extensive journalistic pieces have been published in New York, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and other periodicals. He has written about wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland,^[21] and reported on America’s urban riots of the 1960s. Hamill wrote about the New York underclass and racial division, most notably in an essay for Esquire magazine entitled Breaking the Silence.^[22] He also wrote about boxing, baseball, art, and contemporary music, winning a Grammy Award in 1975 for the liner notes to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.^[23]

Two collections of his selected journalism have been published: Irrational Ravings and Piecework (1996). For the Library of America he edited two volumes of the journalism of A.J. Liebling. In 1998, he published an extended essay on contemporary journalism titled News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century.

Fiction[link]

Hamill has also written fiction, producing ten novels and two collections of short stories. His first novel, a thriller called A Killing for Christ, about a plot to assassinate the Pope on Easter Sunday in Rome, was published in 1968. Drawing on his youth in Brooklyn he next wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called The Gift. Most of his fiction is set in New York City, including Snow in August (1997), Forever (2003), North River (2007), and Tabloid City (2011).

Hamill has published more than 100 short stories in newspapers, including those that were part of a series called The Eight Million in the New York Post; in the Daily News, his stories ran under the title Tales of New York. He has published two volumes of short stories: The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook (1980) and Tokyo Sketches (1992).

Nonfiction[link]

Hamill's 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life, chronicled his journey from childhood into his thirties, his embrace of drinking and the decision to abandon it.^[24] According to Hamill, Frank McCourt was inspired by the book to complete his own memoir, Angela's Ashes.^[25] Hamill's memoir Downtown: My Manhattan includes his reporting for the New York Daily News on the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, at which he was present.^[26]

His book on the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was inspired by time spent in Mexico City in 1957 and his presence at Rivera’s funeral.^[27] In Tools as Art (1995), Hamill surveys the Hechinger Collection and the incorporation of utilitarian objects for aesthetic ends. His biographical essay on the artist was featured in Underground Together: The Art and Life of Harvey Dinnerstein (2008), whose work, like Hamill’s, often focuses on the people and cultural life of Brooklyn.

Hamill’s interest in photography has informed recent essays in nonfiction. New York: City of Islands (2007), celebrates the photography of Jake Rajs. New York Exposed: Photographs from the Daily News (2001) contains an extended essay about the New York Daily News and its role in American photojournalism. In his introduction to Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond (2003), Hamill writes about Agustin Victor Casasola, whose photographs recorded the Revolution of 1910-1920. In his introduction to A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward (2007), Hamill evokes the heyday of American Yiddish journalism. His text for The Times Square Gym (1996) enhances John Goodman's photographs of prizefighters, and his introduction to Garden of Dreams: Madison Square Garden (2004) offers a context for the sports photography of George Kalinski. Hamill’s Irish heritage informs the text for The Irish Face in America (2004), as seen by the photographer Jim Smith.

Hamill has also written about comic strips, of which he is a collector.^[28] Among his writings on the subject are an introduction to Terry and the Pirates: Volume Two by Milton Caniff (2007), and an introductory text for a revised version of Al Hirschfeld's The Speakeasies of 1932 (2003). He also contributed an introduction to Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics (2010).

Honors[link]

Hamill received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 2005. In 2010 Hamill received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from St. John’s University.^[29][30] In 2010 he was presented the Louis Auchincloss Prize from the Museum of the City of New York.^[31]

Hamill is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.^[32]

Bibliography[link]

• A Killing for Christ (1968)
• Irrational Ravings (1971, nonfiction)
• The Gift (1973)
• Dirty Laundry (1978)
• Flesh and Blood (1977)
• The Deadly Piece (1979)
• The Invisible City : Short Stories (1980, nonfiction)
• The Guns of Heaven (1984)
• Loving Women (1989)
• Tokyo Sketches : Short Stories (1992, nonfiction)
• A Drinking Life : A Memoir (1995, nonfiction)
• Piecework (1996, nonfiction)
• Snow in August (1998)
• News is a Verb (1998, nonfiction)
• Why Sinatra Matters(1999, nonfiction)
• Diego Rivera (1999, nonfiction)
• Forever (2003)
• Downtown : My Manhattan (2004, nonfiction)
• North River (2007)
• Tabloid City (2011)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• 1993 audio interview of Pete Hamill at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim
• PBS interview with Hamill
• Review of Hamill's novel Forever
• "Pete Hamill Revisits The Newsroom In 'Tabloid City'", interview with Dave Davies of Fresh Air, May 5, 2011.
• Booknotes interview with Hamill on A Drinking Life: A Memoir, May 29, 1994.

Sam Roberts
Sam Roberts perfoming at Lollapalooza in 2007
Background information
Born	(1974-10-02) October 2, 1974 (age 37) Westmount, Quebec, Canada
Origin	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Genres	Rock, Indie Rock
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	Vocals Guitar Bass Violin
Years active	2000 - present
Labels	Secret Brain MapleMusic Recordings Universal Music Canada Cordova Bay UK Pony Canyon (Japan) Lost Highway Records (USA)
Website	Sam Roberts Band
Notable instruments
Gibson ES-335, Fender Telecaster

Sam Roberts (born October 2, 1974) is a Juno Award-winning Canadian rock singer-songwriter, whose 2001 debut release, The Inhuman Condition, became one of the bestselling independent releases in Quebec and Canadian music history.

Life and career[link]

Born in Westmount three weeks after his parents immigrated to Montreal from South Africa, Sam Roberts grew up on Cedar Avenue in Pointe-Claire, where his family moved when he was five years old. He attended St. Edmund Elementary School in Beaconsfield, Loyola High School in N.D.G. and John Abbott College in Ste. Anne de Bellevue before graduating from McGill University in Montreal. Roberts formed the band that eventually became known as William in 1993. The band's name was changed to Northstar in 1996. Although the band gained some notice in independent rock circles, they never broke through to a national audience and broke up in 1999 after failing to release an album.^[1] Roberts' bandmate George Donoso went on to significant success in indie rock circles with The Dears but Roberts struggled for several years afterward.

After disbanding Northstar in 1999, Roberts promptly recorded the full-length and now very collectible independent debut, Brother Down, at his home. In 2001, Roberts recorded and independently released a six-song EP, The Inhuman Condition. The EP sold slowly at first but following a re-release in the summer of 2002 on MapleMusic Recordings, his first single, "Brother Down", became one of the biggest Canadian hits of the year and was followed by the second single, "Don't Walk Away Eileen", in the fall.

Roberts then signed to Universal Music and released his full-length major label debut, We Were Born in a Flame, in June 2003. That album's singles, "Where Have All the Good People Gone?" and "Hard Road", received a large amount of success, although mainly in Canada.

The band's second album, Chemical City, was released in Canada in April 2006. The first single was "The Gate", which quickly shot to number one on Canadian rock radio. The second single in Canada was "Bridge to Nowhere", which won the Juno Award for Video of the Year in 2007. "With a Bullet", the third song used to promote the album on Canadian radio, received little attention and no video was made for it.

Roberts' third album, Love at the End of the World, was released in May 2008. It debuted at the number one position on the Canadian album chart,^[2] a first for Roberts. The lead single, "Them Kids", debuted on iTunes on March 4, 2008.

Sam Roberts is trilingual, speaking English, French, and Spanish. He married his high school sweetheart Jen in 2004 and they have three children.^[3]

Sam Roberts and his bandmates released their fourth studio album, "Collider", on May 10, 2011.^[4] It is the first album under the moniker "Sam Roberts Band" instead of "Sam Roberts".^[5] The first single, "I Feel You" was officially released to Canadian radio on February 28, with an iTunes Canada release of March 8.

Band members[link]

The members of the Sam Roberts Band as of 2011 are:

• Sam Roberts (lead singer, guitar)
• Dave Nugent (lead guitar)
• Eric Fares (keyboard, guitar)
• James Hall (bass)
• Josh Trager (drums)

Discography[link]

• Brother Down (2000)
• We Were Born in a Flame (2003)
• Chemical City (2006)
• Love at the End of the World (2008)
• Collider (2011)

Awards and nominations[link]

Juno Awards[link]

The Juno Awards is a Canadian awards ceremony presented annually by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

MuchMusic Video Awards[link]

The MuchMusic Video Awards is an annual awards ceremony presented by the Canadian music video channel MuchMusic. Roberts has received five awards from fourteen nominations.^[6][7][8][9]

Notable performances[link]

• July 31, 2003: Opening performer at Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto, otherwise referred to as SARStock, promoted to mitigate the economic downturn in Toronto following a limited outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
• June 12, 2003: National Hockey League's (NHL) NHL Awards ceremony main performer
• November 16, 2003: Canadian Football League's (CFL) 91st Grey Cup halftime show in Regina, Saskatchewan.
• July 2, 2005: Live 8 concert in Barrie, Ontario.
• January 1, 2008: AMP Energy NHL Winter Classic, outdoor ice hockey game in Buffalo, New York.
• August 2, 2008: Opened for The Eagles in Moncton, New Brunswick
• March 29, 2009: Performed at the 2009 Juno Awards
• July 18,19 2009: Performed at Folk on the Rocks, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.
• August 7, 2009: Performed a free concert at Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, in honour of Sidney Crosby and his Stanley Cup win.
• February 20, 2010: Performed at 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
• December 31, 2010: Performed free concert in Brampton, Ontario for New Year's Eve celebrations.
• June 25, 2011: Performed at Bobcaygeon Musicfest in Bobcaygeon.
• July 1, 2011: Performed a free concert in Ottawa on Canada Day for Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.
• September 9, 2011: Performed at University of Toronto's FROSH week.

See also[link]

• Canadian rock
• Music of Canada

References[link]

External links[link]

• Sam Roberts Band
• Sam Roberts on Myspace
• Sam Roberts at the Internet Movie Database
• Sam Roberts Band collection at the Internet Archive's live music archive