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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:  73 reviews
Sales Rank: 3035
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
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 68 more reviews...
 Less than you'd expect October 11, 2008
As a fellow member of the alternative press I have attended stirring lectures by David Carr at national enclaves and gained great benefit from his advice and admonitions. I have great respect for his work. The core idea of this book is excellent and thought provoking. The result, unfortunately, doesn't live up to its promise. As with so many books that miss their mark, the glove seems smaller than the hand it is being stretched to fit.
The idea of investigating one's own life story, particularly a life as skewed as Carr's, appears fruitful. His examination of the failure and fluidity of memory is not without merit and he apparently lived through some wild and crazy times. Between his vile behavior and enormous drug intake, it is small wonder that he preferred to forget. He is a great story teller and he furnished himself with some great material.
But the second half of the the book, which covers his years in recovery, comes off as precious and boastful. Carr regales us with his professional success, parental dedication and marital choices in a wearying voice. Me, me, me, me. He makes some small effort to correct his more recent memories, bound as they are to be as suspect as the rest, but he seems too impressed with himself to achieve any deep meaning.
 The Night of the Gun October 10, 2008
I think this story is a good one about addiction. It doesn't tell all the seedy stuff that could have happened but it shows the life of an addict who is a pretty good guy with a pretty bad addiction. David Carr seems to have really looked at himself so that he could see himself as progressing towards recovery. I'm not sure he is completely recovered if you can ever be. David was able to stay above the fray to some extent. I think I liked the simple story, the honesty and the availability of the writer. He writes a simple, difficult but interesting story.
 A Bit Scattered, But with some Verve October 8, 2008
I can think of a few (good) reasons why a person would be drawn to reading this book. For one, David Carr has become a bit of a media celebrity. He is "The Carpetbagger" after all. Then there is the chance to hear an honest recovery story.
I think people enjoy reading about the craft of journalism. It is a field that has room for people like Rick Bragg and Ben Bradlee, and a lot in between. It is not like politics or sausage, but the making of a newspaper is really different on the inside.
David Carr's Night of the Gun reveals that he has been a free spirit, who if it had not been for the tolerance of the working press, might have never been more than a junkie.
Addiction is a serious thing to explore. He makes the point that most recovery stories have a tried and true formula: drug user/drunk reaches bottom, dries up, finds peace, slides back, and then makes it to an understanding that every day is a battle.
I suppose that is the arc of his life, too. A critic of the book might think that going so deeply into the fun of the early years is to make reverence of something that is wrong. I don't know. Carr paid some dues, no doubt.
If you gave this book to someone who was experimenting with substances, they would have to be hard-headed to not see that there this person paid a heavy price for his lifestyle. In the end, having backslid a number of times, Carr states and over and over again the mantra of anyone that is in recovery - that he is powerless over drugs and alcohol and that his only hope for a normal life is to do it one day at a time, one moment at a time.
Carr's unique contribution is to not trust his memory. Its sort of a response to James Frey, maybe. He tapes, photographs, photocopies, and films any recollection of his past life. The Night of the Gun, the title of the book, refers to a memory that he had about a friend pulling a gun. Turns out his memory was wrong. He pulled the gun.
A unexpected gift was to hear another view on the Jayson Blair event. It sounds like Carr really went out of his way to mentor Blair in his moment of crisis.
I liked this book, but it is not a home run. Carr has a way of writing short. He begins a story, then skips on to the next one before he really has time to explore it. I would have been fine with half as many stories, and twice as much reflection. You know, there was something a bit "scattered" about these memories.
An Interesting Alternative to Memory October 7, 2008
I've read a few memoirs on addiction and the idea that David Carr approached his story as an objective reporter on his own life intrigued me. There is some merit to his method as a way to ferret out more of the truth--the third side of the story--but the result is a little too objective, a little cold. Find more of my reviews and recommendation at allthepage.today.com.
Great story obscured by self-centered detail October 6, 2008
"The Night of the Gun" has an intriguing premise: unnerved by a loss of confidence in the integrity of his memory, recovering crackhead and crack reporter David Carr decides to turn the tools of his trade on himself and investigate his own past. Unfortunately, this gimmick isn't enough to sustain what is ultimately a pretty typical tale of addiction and recovery.
The book is strongest when Carr is reporting on his harrowing descent into a drug-induced psychosis. Let's face it, this is a side of humanity most of us will never experience for ourselves, and hearing someone tell how he left twin baby girls inside a car on a winter night to go do some coke, or had to soak his arms scabbed from needles in a basin of detergent because the people at the detox center were afraid to touch him, delivers a frisson of horror at the spectacle and relief that we'll never tread down that path.
There are also some brief but intriguing side forays into the ephemeral nature of memory and the implications on the narratives we write about ourselves.
The weakest part of the book comes in its last third, when Carr is well on the path to recovery (a brief detour into alcohol abuse adds a bit of drama later on) and is rebuilding his journalistic career. Carr is obviously a hard-driving reporter and editor, but a long stretch of the book ends up being a self-congratulatory look at his professional credentials. While he acknowledges shortcomings, much of it comes off feeling more like he's answering the job-interview question, "What is your biggest weakness?" with hoary responses like "I push people to excel too much".
Carr's obviously a sharp guy and writes about his past with a pretty dispassionate and critical eye. He doesn't shy away about owning up to mistakes, but also doesn't attempt to take the blame for every bad thing that transpired, if the finger of evidence points elsewhere.
Carr does indicate that he understands the potential pitfalls of his project. One editor tells him before starting that the recovery parts of junkie stories are "soooo boring". He also briefly meditates on his apparently widely-known narcissistic tendencies. It's a shame he didn't take those reflections a little more seriously and chop about 100 pages from the book.
There is a great story in here, and one can only marvel Carr's improbable turnaround and come away wishing him a clean and healthy future. It's just too bad that it is often obscured by Carr's need to air lots of detail that isn't really that compelling to people who are not David Carr.
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