New Book Explores the Difficulties of Biography.

Novelist, journalist and columnist Pete Hamill. He's written seven novels, including "Flesh and Blood" and "Loving Women." Most recently he was editor-in-chief at the New York Post. His latest book is a memoir of the years he spent drinking: "A Drinking Life: A Memoir." (Little, Brown & Co.) Hamill quit drinking twenty years ago. One reviewer in Publishers Weekly writes of HAMILL's new memoir, "This is not a jeremiad condemning drink, but a thoughtful, funny, street-smart reflection on its consequences." (REBROADCAST from 1/19/94)

Writer Shirlee Taylor Haizlip. Her book "The Sweeter the Juice: a Family Memoir in Black and White," (Simon & Schuster), chronicles her exploration of six generations of her multiracial family tree. Haizlip is a light-skinned African-American. Her father was a prominent black Baptist minister in Connecticut. Her mother was the descendant of an Irish immigrant and a mulatto slave.