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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
Buy New: $14.50
You Save: $11.50 (44%)
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 149
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)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Bought new, and have not read it.
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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 3 more reviews...
 Good, but David Carr's narcissism makes it a bit rough to read at times. August 12, 2008
8 out of 15 found this review helpful
As a former addict and one with a story that has a lot of parallels to that of David Carr, I enjoyed reading this book. I was able to relate to a lot of what he went through and he did a great job of putting the misery of low-bottom addiction into words. My only complaint with this book is that Mr. Carr narcissistic personality is evident in The Night of the Gun. The way he told his story just made him sound full of himself, not humble like many in recovery are. Still a good read, worth checking out.
 If the story sounds familiar, the approach will not. The result is excellent. August 11, 2008
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
It sounds like books you've read before; the true stories of a junkie's drug-addled existence, the downward spiral, the damage to friends, family and career. Like many of those books, this one too is written by the former junkie himself. But this book is not like the others. It's author, David Carr, is a journalist who decides to see how he fares when he turns the journalistic spotlight on his own past as a cocaine addict. He sets his book apart immediately from the others with one assumption: his own memories are not to be trusted.
As Carr points out, human memory is proven to be a strangely untrustworthy source for solid information. The memory of a junkie? Carr knows any reporter worth his salt would need to do better. So Carr does.
Carr re-creates his years as a cocaine addict the way he would a newspaper story about someone else. He interviews former friends, girlfriends and associates to check their memories versus his own. He looks back at police and court records and he connects dots. The results usually paint an ugly picture of the man Carr used to be, but he never seems to back away from his task even at times when he's clearly uncomfortable with what he's discovered.
Carr's fresh approach takes a story that has the potential to be good, but undistinguished, and turns it into something that makes you feel like you're reading something special and unique. It's the non-fiction version of A Million Little Pieces (at which Carr takes a shot without ever using its name).
Highly recommended for anyone who likes addiction chronicles or for anyone who just appreciates a successful attempt to do something new and different.
 The Epiphanies Are Fascinating, and The Scabs Gnarly August 9, 2008
8 out of 14 found this review helpful
"Carr takes as a given that our memories are suspect, compromised by the understandable desire to make a coherent story from shapeless experience, to cast ourselves in the role of hero (or dashing villain), and to inject a bit of drama when the plot begins to sag." Jennifer Reese
David Carr, media critic for the New York Times has written an extraordinary book of his life of addiction. He tells the truth, but not enough of himself is disclosed. I don't get a feel for the man until later in the book. True he researched this book like a journalist- he traced all of his old contacts and interviewed them because his memory was faulty at best. His depicitions and summaries of his friends and lovers are all well drawn out and illustrated. The story is not pretty. He started out as a drunk- one of 3 or 4 in his immediate family, by the way. He then moved on to cocaine and finally injecting it. Drugs were his life, he lived for them. His friends were the ones who helped him get his drugs. His girlfriends, part of the crowd. And he worked to buy the drugs,got fired, somehow got drugs again and found a job and on and on. His girlfriend Anna, got pregnant and on the night he gave her a needle to inject cocaine, her water broke. The twins were born 2 1/2 months early. He still did drugs and so did she. He gave up drugs the night he left his twins in the car in the middle of winter to go buy his drugs- he left them in the car for 5 minutes or was it hours- who knows?
David Carr goes straight for many years. Bringing up his twins alone for six years, meets the love of his life, marries, has another child, moves along on his journalism carrer. The portrait of his family, his twin girls and wife are revealing and insightful. And, then, well things were too good, so he starts drinking again. Up until this portion of the story, it is pretty cut and dry and sometimes boring. The latter part of his life with his new wife and children are the most interesting portions. He and his family are brought to life. I start to care about this man and the women in it. His story is straight and true, and not as hyped up and gaudy as James Frey's story of addiction. David Carr finally comes to life and in just in time.
"The epiphanies are fascinating, and the scabs gnarly
Even when Carr does eventually enter rehab and make good, his tale veers unnervingly from the familiar and reassuring arc of the recovery narrative. Maybe that's what happens when you stick to the facts. Carr is as immoderate in his drive to unearth every detail of his sordid past as he once was to hoover up that last grain of coke on the floor. You may not forgive Carr his flamboyant misdeeds as readily as he seems to forgive himself, all the while patting himself on the back for his brutal honesty. But he is an undeniably brilliant and dogged journalist. "Jennifer Reese
Recommended. prisrob 08-09-08
RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "THERE WAS NO TIME TO PANIC... BUT THE PANIC CAME ANYWAY." August 6, 2008
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
This gripping memoir by New York Times reporter David Carr is like a three-hundred-eighty-five page-pre-paid ticket for a roller coaster ride to drug-hell. Once the reader climbs aboard, this roller coaster travels straight down ninety-percent of the time. The author will lead you through the hellish remains of the way his life used to be... going from pot and alcohol, to cocaine addiction... and then to the final barren chamber, in the deepest darkest, dungeon of all addictive drug hell... smoking crack cocaine. He was in such bad shape, that even all of his main drug buddies, undid their seat belts and jumped off the ride... as the roller coaster and author flew way off the rails. As David attempts to tell his story... he suddenly realizes that he can't remember what really happened to him. He starts off telling his "romanticized" version of his drug-crazed exploits... but when he finds his old friends and family members (that actually lived through the self-destructive atomic haze) he very quickly found out, that what he thought he remembered, differed completely from the other "survivor's recollection... including the night one of his best friends put a gun to his head... as alluded to in the title. The only problem with that scenario, is that his friend contacted twenty years after... states that David pulled the gun on him. David quite "clearly" remembers that he never owned a gun. But, then he tracks down another friend from the past who tells him, that twenty years ago, David had him go to his house... to get his gun out... before the cops... that the author was fleeing from... got there to search his house.
The outright marvelous writing and colloquialisms that the author paints his story around, are certifiable genius, and makes the potential reader hope the author continues to publish more books of this genre, whether in autobiographical or novel form, before you've even read one-quarter of this book. When the author realizes that he can no longer vouch for any of his raucous, debauchery, depraved, self-destructive former life... he decides to buy video and recording equipment, and hunt down the role players from his past, and interview them, to get their perspective on his time in self-imposed hell. And thus the statement:
*** "PEOPLE REMEMBER WHAT THEY CAN LIVE WITH MORE OFTEN THAN HOW THEY LIVED." ***************************
As the author's drug use spiraled out of control his innate writing talent would give him temporary employment until employers couldn't look the other way anymore. In hindsight David says: "SOMETIMES ADDICTION SEEMS MORE LIKE POSSESSION, A DEATH GRIP FROM SATAN THAT REQUIRES SUPERNATURAL INTERVENTION." If there is a bottom that is lower than "BOTTOMING-OUT" then David takes you there with a little help from his friends. Is it possible to descend any lower as a human being, than when Anna was pregnant with the author's twin girls and "SHE WAS USING CRACK WHEN HER WATER BROKE, SIGNALING THAT THE TWINS HAD ARRIVED TWO-AND-A-HALF MONTHS EARLY. I WAS THE ONE WHO BROUGHT HER THOSE DRUGS."
Throughout this guided tour of soulless descent, the author demonstrates literary "chops" that the leading writers of detective yarns could only hope to emulate. In describing one of his former dope dealers he says: "PHIL COULD BE FUN AS HELL WHEN HE WASN'T "CONDUCTING", WHICH IS WHAT HE CALLED DEALING, FULL OF STREET LORE, PHILOSOPHY, AND MIND GAMES. SOME GUYS LOOK TOUGH. SOME GUYS TALK TOUGH. SOME GUYS ARE TOUGH. PHIL HIT FOR THE CYCLE." A simple off-hand throw-away comment about cokeheads: "the eyes that saw too much because they did not close often enough." A simple off the cuff statement about a stop on a typical night out would make Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais proud: "WE WENT BAR HOPPING AND ENDED UP AT "STAND UP FRANK'S, THE KIND OF PLACE WHERE A SCREWDRIVER WAS A GLASS FULL OF VODKA THAT THE BARTENDER WHISPERED THE WORDS "ORANGE JUICE" OVER BEFORE HANDING IT TO YOU."
This is an immensely talented writer... who doesn't need to make up street-jargon... he lived it. If he stays clean... and doesn't relapse back into the world he already lived in... but just truly discovered on this follow-up journey... that for example... he was actually in treatment centers five times... even though for the last twenty years he thought he was only in four times... then the reading public as a whole... has an awful lot of exciting literature to read and enjoy in the future.
Remember David... ONE DAY AT A TIME!
learning how not to stare. August 2, 2008
2 out of 8 found this review helpful
Biographies are an art form. Great writers can do a lot with poor material, J G Ballard created epics out of stuff he found in the waste basket after all. Telling stories and memories are funny things, they change and evolve over time. Anyone who is trying to put together their childhood memories are often thrown by others who remember things in a very different fashion. Sometimes there is no doubt about events though, court cases, arrests, homelessness, ill health all spell the downward spiral of many an addict. The issue with Car''s biography that he starts it as an adult. He doesn't stray into the minefield of childhood which he claims was happy, loving and carefree to a certain extent or even to the issue of what drew him to his current wife (besides beauty, talent and receptivity) who is years younger than him and who drinks alcohol, the cause for so many of his problems. There is indeed a great narrative here, a spell blinding display of what treatment for addiction is, a stunning grasp of a total lack of self preservation at certain times and stubborn persistence to suceed at others. There is however nothing there that seems to explain why alcohol sets off violence in him, or his psychopathic side which views people as ATM machines, not every alcoholic becomes the hulk when they imbibe, some of them can even be pleasant to view or we certainly wouldn't have a hollywood to entertain us. Digging as deep as Carr has into domestic violence, child neglect, ill health, self neglect is indeed noteworthy. There is no question this is the basis for the best seller, tv movie and more. There is just the issue of why him specifically that doesn't get addressed. Genetics can only be part of the story. I came away feeling that I didn't get the whole drift but that's a normal experience when dealing with an alcoholic or addict the story eventually doesn't jibe with the medium. We all want a happy ending but there has to be a beginning and the beginning wasn't when Carr took his first drink, drug, or met the women of his worst nightmare or eventually his future dreams and happiness. If he wanted to leave a legacy for his twins perhaps he would have dared to cross that line rather than repeatedly cross every boundary of self preservation later on in life.
Maresie.
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