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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:  124 reviews
Sales Rank: 4010
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
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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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 119 more reviews...
 David Carr turns the gun on himself -- and lives to tell the harrowing tale July 27, 2008
72 out of 82 found this review helpful
"Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a guy threw himself under a crosstown bus and lived to tell the tale," David Carr writes. "Is that a book you'd like to read?"
Good question. Indeed, it's the question that prospective readers of "The Night of the Gun", Carr's warts-and-all memoir, will have to consider --- because this is that book.
Consider:
A talented kid without much direction graduates from high school pot smoking to cocaine at college.
He starts a career in journalism that has him reporting on police and government officials by day --- and freebasing cocaine at night.
He hooks up with a woman who deals dope. Driving to see her, he's so wrecked he almost crashes into a station wagon filled with kids. He skids into a ditch, has to spend the night in jail, misses his girlfriend's birthday. When he finally shows up, he gives her what can't be bought in any store: a black eye and a broken rib.
He introduces his girlfriend to crack. She gets pregnant. They become so thoroughly addicted that, just as her water is breaking, he's handing her a crack pipe. Their twin daughters are crack babies.
He splits with his girlfriend, and, because he has a nice job, keeps the girls with him. This does not stop him from locking them in the car while he runs into a dealer's house to score.
The gun: As he recalls it, he was so out of control that his best friend not only has to call the cops but wave a gun at him. His best friend remembers it another way --- as David's gun.
In detox, his arms are so nasty that the staffers have him reach into a tub of detergent so they don't have to touch him. It takes a full month for the drug psychosis to wear off. And he does rehab four times before he finally gets clean.
There are 300+ pages like that in "The Night of the Gun" --- it is a long downward spiral. Reading it, I thought of the Emmylou Harris lines: "One thing they don't tell you about the blues/When you got 'em/You keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom/There ain't no end..."
So, you may ask, what kept me reading?
In part, because David Carr emerges from the darkness into a kind of radiance: a new wife, intact family, great job. And because, at the center of his redemption, is a reason a lot of guys can relate to: "Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine."
And, in part, because I know David Carr. Like him a lot. Knew nothing about his past. And so was gobsmacked by every page. For those who do not traffic in New York media circles or read the paper of record, David Carr is the media columnist and sometime culture reporter for The New York Times. He's witty and gutsy and almost always fun to read --- when he's in the Times, I open it with actual enthusiasm.
There's another, better reason I kept reading. I have known a number of people who became addicts. I don't know any now --- some died, some got clean, and those who didn't drifted far from my ambitious, middle-class circle. As a result, I sometimes find my sympathies for addicts to be more abstract than real.
But at least I can still see addicts as victims of a terrible disease. A great many people in our country can't --- which is one reason we spend many times more money on a "war on drugs" and on jails that don't rehabilitate than we do on treatment centers. "The Night of the Gun" is a stark reminder that nice people from good families can sink just as low as the hard case from the projects --- and that drug addiction can, with luck and skill and love and patience, be cured.
David Carr was lucky. His sickness struck him when he lived in Minnesota, an enlightened state with many treatment facilities. He was lucky to have a friend like Dave, who showed up every Sunday to babysit the girls so Carr could go to meetings. (I dare you not to burst into tears when Dave is dying and Carr leans over him to whisper: "I owe you everything in the world.") And he was way lucky that a good woman took him in and made a home for him and his kids.
A few years ago, armed with a tape recorder and a video camera, David Carr went on the road to interview the people who knew him when. The results aren't pretty --- there are videos on his web site that made me wince --- but they certainly leave no doubt about the veracity of the story that he tells. The columnist who wrote about James Frey is not, in any way, like him.
David Carr now finds himself a "genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be a loving and attentive father and husband."
For all that, he says, "I now inhabit a life I don't deserve."
I disagree.
Good News is No News September 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Night of the Gun" is a great sobriety memoir--and a slap in the face of most other entries in the genre.
Whereas other "memoir" authors (cough--James Frey--cough) hammered their facts to fit the story they wanted to tell, Carr takes the opposite approach, and looks for the truth behind the stories he's told to himself and others over the years. He's looking for facts, not memories, and trying to reshape the latter to fit the former.
That's what sets this book above so many others--as an experienced working journalist, Carr has different priorities than the essayists and fabulists he's up against.
There are correlations and dichotomies between journalism and alcoholism. A journalist wants to remember things; an alcoholic often drinks to forget. And yet both love stories, and alcohol is a sure lubricant to get them flowing, so it isn't really surprising there's such overlap between the circles--an intersection Carr found himself at for many long years.
As with all alcoholics, the details are harrowing--and ordinary. Carr's particular passions were crack and brown liquor, and they took him to bad places--threatening violence against friends, perpetrating it against women, and using drugs with the mother of his children while she was pregnant with said children. Every addict and alcoholic believes themselves unique, but their disease takes them all down different sides of the same funnel, and towards the same place--a hole of spiritual emptiness and mental and physical destruction. And paridoxically, this is where Carr's book shines--it's easy to paint one's drinking and drugging as fun and tough and glamorous, but it's a lot harder--and more worthwhile--to take a long, sober look at behavior and consequences.
Where it occasionally falls flat is in chronicling his return to respectable society. Andy Rooney once wrote a great column debunking the whole "why-don't-they-report-the-good-news?" question--the column was full of good news, and sentences like this: "The orange crop in Florida was hit by another day of average weather. The oranges just hung there and grew." His point was simple: Good news is boring. It's boring because it's what's supposed to happen.
Perhaps that's the problem with journalists and alcoholics, then. More so than most, they find the bad compelling and intriguing and worthy of endless attention. Though sober now, Carr did not stay that way the whole time--he, in programspeak, "transferred to the R&D wing of the organization for additional research." To his credit, though, he writes honestly and forthrightly about this episode and what led up to it--an unwillingness, or a failure, do do what a program of recovery demands. One's memory even of one's own life is fungible, and that's what keeps so many people waking up, again and again until they try something different, to the same old bad news.
Speak, Memory September 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Sometimes the choice between sanity & chaos is a riddle" (p5)
In a time when so many "memoirs" are unmasked as fiction at best, the premise of Carr's searing memoir, takes any such accusation head on.
Do we remember only the stories we can live with?
Paying heed to Dostoyevsky's deft observation, "man is bound to lie about himself" (Notes from the Underground), Carr goes on a journey back into the long night of his years as an addict to divine harsh truth from the figments of selective memory.
Turning his investigative reporter skills unto himself, his aim is to cut through addiction's "self-induced Alzheimer's"(p. 12) to discern exactly what he did or did not do. Where Carr thought a friend pulled a gun on him one chemical fueled night, it turns out to be other way around.
From a guy who never even thought he owned a gun.
You may ask, what is the point of writing a memoir, besides vanity? Why air your dirty laundry in public? What sets this chronicle of addiction apart from the plethora of other's?
As Carr himself almost cynically puts it, " recovery stories go down a very familiar track:
I had a beer with friends.
Then I shot dope in my neck.
I got into trouble.
I saw the error of my ways.
I found Jesus or 12 Steps or Bhaktki yoga.
Now everything is new again" (p. 177)
Besides being exceptionally well written, what sets Carr's memoir apart is the intensity of his self searching & a willingness to accept what he finds.
So how did David Carr go from Twin City's local Hunter S. Thompson to mainlining coke every 20 minutes inbetween crack hits? Or from lost cause to single parent raising twin daughters? Local cub reporter to NY Times staff writer? Or, from 14 year sobriety success story to binging alcoholic?
During the course of his self investigation, Carr not only uncovers some very ugly truths about himself, he also shines a light on what finally inspired him to crawl out of the wreckage of himself.
Throughout it all, Carr never lets himself off the hook, taking full responsibility for his actions, blaming no one but himself. While guilt is unavoidable, his narrative never falls into self pity.
The reader, along with Carr comes to understand that the addict within never really goes away. He or she simply finds something else to latch onto. Whether it be sex, work or religion. That part of you is always there doing pushups in the basement, waiting for you to unlock the door.
At the end, he comes to understand that memory is indeed a labyrinth with many twists, turns, & false ends. Not to mention, one with a hell of a Minotaur lurking in the shadows...
From lower depth to precarious redemption, Carr's book is one of the most sincere & substantial memoirs of it's kind to come along in recent years. Damning, yet inspiring, it's a crash course in Honesty. Something one could say is in short supply nowadays.
The Night of the Gun October 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Unconventional, but great October 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read the preview for this book and wanted to buy it, but hadn't yet. I then got the chance to get it on Vine and jumped on it.
Essentially this is a now reputable journalist who has had a shady past. He was a drug addict among other things. He went on a multi-year journey to see if his recollection of events were correct. What he found was that mostly he thought he was better than he actually was.
At times it's a bit hard to follow (maybe it's a bit too intellectual for me), but it's a very transparent look into his past as well as how he rationalized it.
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