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The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own | 
 enlarge | Author: David Carr
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 748
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Simon & Schuster Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 1416541527
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.860092
EAN: 9781416541523
ASIN: 1416541527
Publication Date: August 5, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: "There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth." David Carr's riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can't write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader's trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it's hard to love David Carr--sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it--will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls--makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Product Description
Do we remember only the stories we can live with? The ones that make us look good in the rearview mirror? In The Night of the Gun, David Carr redefines memoir with the revelatory story of his years as an addict and chronicles his journey from crack-house regular to regular columnist for The New York Times. Built on sixty videotaped interviews, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting, The Night of the Gun is a ferocious tale that uses the tools of journalism to fact-check the past. Carr's investigation of his own history reveals that his odyssey through addiction, recovery, cancer, and life as a single parent was far more harrowing -- and, in the end, more miraculous -- than he allowed himself to remember. Over the course of the book, he digs his way through a past that continues to evolve as he reports it. That long-ago night he was so out of his mind that his best friend had to pull a gun on him to make him go away? A visit to the friend twenty years later reveals that Carr was pointing the gun. His lucrative side business as a cocaine dealer? Not all that lucrative, as it turned out, and filled with peril. His belief that after his twins were born, he quickly sobered up to become a parent? Nice story, if he could prove it. The notion that he was an easy choice as a custodial parent once he finally was sober? His lawyer pulls out the old file and gently explains it was a little more complicated than that.
In one sense, the story of The Night of the Gun is a common one -- a white-boy misdemeanant lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding, and a support group that will go unnamed. But when the whole truth is told, it does not end there. After fourteen years -- or was it thirteen? -- Carr tried an experiment in social drinking. Double jeopardy turned out to be a game he did not play well. As a reporter and columnist at the nation's best newspaper, he prospered, but gained no more adeptness at mood-altering substances. He set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded all too well, including two more arrests, one that included a night in jail wearing a tuxedo. Ferocious and eloquent, courageous and bitingly funny, The Night of the Gun unravels the ways memory helps us not only create our lives, but survive them.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Craft-y September 4, 2008
This is a multifaceted gem of structure and style, and would fit comfortably on a reading list for fiction, memoir, journalism, creative writing, etc. upper division English courses. He demonstrates all the tips and tricks of a good journalist, and the results are engaging. While so much careful structuring can be predictable, to the careful reader, it's also a comforting milieu in which to examine unsympathetic subjects.
I'm way more impressed with the execution of this book than I was with the initial concept; now both seem very brave.
Surpasses "memoir"- real lifeblood pulses in the ink September 4, 2008
In "Night of the Gun", David Carr states numerous times that he doesn't fully know why he wrote a memoir, and finds most "junkie memoirs" a waste of time. As a reporter he covered the James Frey scandal and worked with Jayson Blair on The New York Times when HIS scandal broke, so he fully knows how unbelievable (especially lately) most memoirs and tell-alls are viewed and how easy it is to lie to the general public. "The arc of the addict has become as warm & familiar as a Hallmark movie: the textured childhood, the abasement, the epiphany, the relapse, the ultimate surrender."
For him, Carr has a happy childhood, and even though he constantly describes himself in different degrees of being rude, boorish, fat, messy and having anger management issues- he is never without friends and usually involved with a beautiful woman. There's definitely a lot to dislike about Carr. He admits to hitting girlfriends, and where was he when the water broke before the birth of his twin girls? Right next to their mother- handing her a crack pipe. If Carr was a fictionl character and "The Night of the Gun" was a thriller/crime novel, I would probably despise him. Since this is a memoir, it's a bit more complicated than that.
As a journalist, Carr decided to research his own story with countless interviews of people in his life past and present and looked up medical and police records. He knew how tenuous memories are (especially from people a long history of coke & crack usage, like himself.) This memoir is as much about memory as it is everything else, and it's fascinating to read what Carr thought happened an dthen find out how wrong he was. I think he succeeded at painting a complete picture as possible- and that made it a sometimes hard read, and a very hard book to review. It's hard to review the life of someone you don't know- and Carr is so brutally open and has so much third party insights and even scans of actual documents stuffed into his memoir that yes, reviewing the book really is reviewing the life, and the person. And really, who am I to do that?
Carr writes about his drug addiction, his later alcoholism, single parenthood and random violence (most of which he doesn't remember, one such incident is where the title comes from) from a view where he is happily married, happy in his work and his twin daughters are flourishing in college. Even with that in mind, Carr's tendency to self-destruct still remains and gives even the current happy moments a nervy suspense.
Is the book an entertaining read? Yes. It's filled with misadventures and it's very well-written. Would I recommend it to friends? In a heartbeat. Is Carr easy to root for? Yes and no, and because I'm so strong on both sides of that I know he opened up his veins and bled these words out. I didn't know who Carr was before I read this, and I still don't know the man personally. However, I do feel invested in his life now and I'm positive a few years down the road I'll be searching online for updates to make sure he and his family are still doing ok. To me, that says a lot about the power of this memoir.
 One Man's Misguided Appetite for Life and His Courage in the Aftermath September 3, 2008
Writing with a prose that is muscular, smart, clear, but never pretentious, Carr chronicles his drug addiction--and the ruthless will that plowed over everyone and anything that attempted to impede his getting high--in order to paint of fascinating character profile--an exceedingly gifted man, a journalist, who is possessed by a gnawing emptiness and a need to take risks and impose risks on himself resulting in self-destruction. Growing up in the suburbs of Minnesota, Carr learns to medicate his sense of adventure and insatiable appetite for new experience with drugs that are more and more toxic as he tries to lead a double life: a drug addict and a journalist. The result is a wiser man, "This Man," and the lost man of his past, "That Man," and in this contrast we witness a powerful narrative of redemption that renders all the complexities, contradictions, and knots that defy the simplistic phony self-mythologizing narratives of redemption and sobriety.
Carr's exceptional brilliance and honesty make his highly readable memoir transcend the banal, sanctimonious "recovery books" and compels me to put his book on the shelf of my other favorite memoir dealing with addiction--Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight.
The Night of the Gun September 1, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The structure of this book is confusing. Carr takes us back and forth and back again. This disrupts the sense of tension. His devotion to his kids is admirable, but I had a bit of a struggle sticking with this book. The
Bad boys finish first September 1, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Shades of Hemingway, shades of Poe... I am a long time admirer of Carr's media column in the New York Times, but now I can't help wondering if he would be the success he is today if he had NOT abused drugs and alcohol.
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