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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:  70 reviews
Sales Rank: 2425
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 65 more reviews...
 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.
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.
memory is a tricky thing October 5, 2008
Memory's a tricky thing, especially when you're a crackhead. Journalist David Carr knew that some of his memories of his drug-addled days were a bit hazy, but it was only when a friend remembered Carr waving a gun in his face that Carr realised how wrong some of his own memories might be. He remembered his druggie years as a relatively short downward spiral that didn't really impact anyone else, a couple of attempts at recovery, a couple of arrests, and then a pretty fast return to the real world.
Upon discovering the difference between his memory and others' memories of the night of the gun, Carr decides to investigate his own past. Doing so reveals some uncomfortable truths, such as that Carr wasn't as good of a guy as he remembers. He was violent many times. Digging through his police recorde, he discovered that he even got arrested for beating up a cabbie entirely unprovoked one night, an event that he still can't recall.
The story is interesting through the investigation of the real downward spiral (both longer and messier than he realised, although the stories began to get repetitive), the final successful six-month inpatient treatment, and his long recovery period afterwards. However, the story falters after he leaves Minneapolis. Even worse, when he slides back into alcoholism, the story has no depth at all.
As a memoir of addiction, it goes the extra mile to verify the events of the addiction, with often enlightening results for the author. But the author is still too close to his more recent bout of alcoholism to be able to be anything other than self-indulgent in his telling of the story. It's still a worthwhile read.
How do you remember? October 5, 2008
I will admit that yes, I read and enjoyed James Frey's book regarding his addiction. I wasn't upset when it turned out that much of the book was not accurate - I have always believed that everyone brings their own unique filter to life and events, and it was still a good story.
David Carr's "The Night of the Gun" is a completely different animal. Imagine being a junkie. You've used and abused everyone nearest and dearest to you. You've been in jail more than once. You're living as close to on the edge as you can be without actually falling off forever. And then, your pregnant girlfriend's water breaks while you are getting ready to light up the crack pipe to share with her. Where do you go from there? Do you have the strength to pull yourself up and out of the nightmare? And if you do, is the nightmare you remember really the accurate portrayal of your life?
The title comes from a night during which David Carr was still a junkie - in fact, Carr was getting worse than ever. His memory was always that his friend had pulled the gun on him to make him leave. He finds out during the interviewing process for the book that in fact, the gun was his and he was the one waving it around. As Carr says, "Do we remember only the stories we can live with?". Then the question becomes, how do we end up changing those other stories to make them easier to live with? Carr took hours of video and audio, went through documents and pulled in former friends, dealers, girlfriends and family to learn that as bad as he thought he was - the reality was far worse.
I found myself riveted to the story, in the way that rubberneckers are always staring at the scene of a terrible car wreck. Only the wreck was years in the making and affected far more people than just the author. Just the same, I couldn't read more than a few chapters a night, because the story is very dark and, in some places, extremely disturbing. And as I finished the book, my first thought was "There but for the grace of God...". I rarely drink, I don't smoke - but I believe we all have the capacity for darkness...I was just one of the lucky ones.
I enjoyed Frey's book, but that's like comparing a ham sandwich to a filet mignon. One is great for a quick snack, light and kind of enjoyable. The other is best savored in little bites, slowly and over time to process the fullness of the flavor. I enjoy ham sandwiches, but I'd prefer a filet any day.
A Scattershot Memoir. October 4, 2008
Books by recovering addicts are a dime a dozen, and after A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, the attitude from the public towards such books must be pretty damned harsh, which is kind of a shame, since it may make some interested readers take a pass on David Carr's THE NIGHT OF THE GUN. What separates Carr's story from the rest of the pack is that Carr admits he has almost no memory of most of the events described in the book, or if he does, it's probably radically different from the truth. Instead of just plowing ahead and writing something, Carr used his background as a reporter, and went out and interviewed the people he ran with when he was drinking and drugging, and recreated his past through the eyes of others.
The end result is a mixed bag. The first few hundred pages are gripping, as Carr comes to grip with what a lousy person he became in the depths of drug addiction.....Threatening his best friend with a handgun, beating up a cab driver for no apparent reason, and, at one point, leaving his twin infant girls in the car on a freezing night while he went into a crack house and smoked for what may have been hours. Carr pulls no punches, almost daring the reader to find something, ANYTHING, to like about him. His eventual recovery is nothing short of miraculous, and most of the remainder of the book is a love letter to his twins, who quite clearly saved his life. The book drags a bit in the last third, as Carr tries to pull his career together and has a relapse into alcoholism, and it's pretty self-indulgent in places, but overall, it's a harrowing, worthwhile read.
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