I was so irritated by Pete Hamill's "review" of the new Willie Mays biography that I wrote a letter to The New York Times Book Review.
Yesterday the Book Review ran three letters about the review, none of them mine. One was from a man in San Francisco writing about home runs and Candlestick Park (they don't name stadiums like they used to). The other two were from New Yorkers. The first began: "My eyes welled up with tears as I read Pete Hamill's beautiful review..." and ended with the words "which might be the difference between Harlem and the Bronx." The second ended with the sentence: "That was New York."
As in the review, the greatest baseball player in history took a backseat to the vainest city in the world.
