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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:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 584
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
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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 19 more reviews...
 "Clean and Sober" meets "Memento" meets "Naked Lunch". September 5, 2008
This is a book about addiction -- the author's. In fact, David Carr was so addicted and living in such an addled state that he literally could not accurately remember his life story. Thus, this is not really an autobiography but rather a memoir written with information provided by others via interviews of his friends and acquaintances during his harrowing experiences of dependency, relationships, relapse, family, and the destruction of just about everything good in the author's life. He lived to conduct his research and based upon what he discovered (including the truth and himself), he's a very, very lucky man.
Born of necessity, the concept of an autobiography based upon the research of one's own life is a brilliant one and if one is interested in the depths of addictive despair, this is often an interesting read. However, Carr's writing style prevents what might have been great. He recounts his interview information in a somewhat linear fashion, but jumps around based upon the interviewee in question. Dates get mixed up from one paragraph to the next, so I found it difficult to follow and this deals a blow to the arch of despair and redemption I believe he's tried to create. It's as if his writing exists only for his own consumption rather than with the reader primarily in mind. I have never experienced addiction at this level and would at least appreciate a cautionary tale if not a thoroughly visceral ride.
More specifically, Carr treats us to sections of introspection that are often quite effective both in specific terms of addiction and the more general human condition, but then he'll suddenly recount a story of binge drinking and coke snorting or some really terrible way he treated someone due to his downward spiral coupled with one liners from various authors he constantly quotes throughout the narrative. The quoting is an odd device because what I wanted from Carr was the authenticity of his own observations of self-discovery, navigating the information the often embarrassing information revealed in interviews, police reports, etc. This erratic, jarring style is at first interesting, but only in small doses. Initially, I thought this might be deliberate and that the writing would become settled as he began to recover his family and his life, but it doesn't.
Carr has a built-in favorable audience because we root for his recovery from the opening pages and he has his readers' respect for every success and empathy for every failure -- especially the realization that failure, like victory, is only temporary. And it's important not to read "The Night of the Gun" like a novel. Carr's a talented writer and obviously very bright and I wish him success. I also wish this extremely intriguing idea had been written less self-indulgently and more with the reader in mind.
 Brutally honest, fantastically written September 5, 2008
David's brutally honest recall of those dark days stunned even his closest friends and family members. He was a very bad man that did some really bad things. However, his successful recovery and subsequent ability to share what it really felt like to be in those shoes, will most certainly, help any individuals, family members or friends that has or is living a life of addiction. Be prepared to spend a weekend reading it, because I dare you to put it down once start
The memoir goes to the metro desk September 5, 2008
David Carr has a compelling story and tells it from a unique angle--a drug addict turned top reporter. But the "reporting" in this memoir gets in the way: the prose has an over-polished, over-lawyered quality that distances the reader right from the beginning. Carr's consultation of "secondary sources" also forces the reader to constantly shift perspective and breaks contact with the narrator--I felt I knew this guy less at the end that I did at the beginning. "Night of the Gun" may have been verified and confirmed to the last detail, but it lacks the immediacy and emotion of the best memoirs. It's truly sad to me that recent fake-memoir fiascos have transformed this genre into another section of the New York Times, copy-edited and fact-checked into homogenized irrelevancy.
An honest account of addiction September 5, 2008
"The night of the gun" is the story David Carr. He is a hard partying yet brilliant journalist who recounts all the horrible affects of his addiction to alcohol and illicit substances (namely crack cocaine). What makes this book different in accounting his past horrible events as a crack addict/alcoholic is that the author did a great deal of research on himself in order to write the book. He used 60 videotaped interviews with friends, family and former employers/fellow employees, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting to tell his story.
Mr. Carr is very candid in his approach to his addiction. He discusses openly numberous family problems, including the fact that he was a poor father to his daughters while he was openly addicted. He also discusses numberous alcohol and drug related legal problems directly related to his addiction. One of the things I really enjoyed about this particular book is his discussion of the different times he has been in detox/rehab. He has been in and out of detox/rehab 5 times, and self expresses that he "...could give a pretty good presentation off the top of my head on the disease concept of addiction." Normally books on addiction end with the person going through rehab and not drinking/using again. This book discusses relapses associated with addiction, and the phenominon of going through rehab several times and still not benefiting from it (due to the addict/alcoholic not being "ready" to benefit from it yet).
"The night of the gun" is an engaging read about gratitude in being sober. Mr. CArr does not flinch from divulging the worst parts of his addiction to the readers. Anyone who enjoys a coming of age story, or who has been touched by addiction in their life or someone else's life will be touched by this book.
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.
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