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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: $9.00
You Save: $17.00 (65%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 6882
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 101 more reviews...
 Free falling November 18, 2008
How many times have you thought you were in control of your thoughts, words and actions, but when you look back, you wonder, who was that? Or, why was that? The author takes an honest, sobering look at his past and comes up with insightful answers to those questions. This book does what all good books do: it lets you know more about the writer, and it makes you think about your own life in ways you haven't before.
Well written and intriguing November 13, 2008
I had read a lot of reviews before I got this novel, and I must say that the book is very well written, and although I have little sympathy for someone who does drugs, it pulled me along. The lessons he brings in the book are very poignant.
Carr doesn't look for pity in this book -- instead, he lays out his entire sordid history as far as he can remember -- and what he can piece together from other people and records. A good read.
Brilliant and moving November 13, 2008
If you are at all interested in recovery, your own, someone else's or are just looking for an honest story, this is it. Carr is deeply honest in examining his life, the good the bad and the really ugly - everything. He holds nothing back, nor does he reconstruct his history to make himself look better. He tells his life story in flashbacks, interviews and clippings, constructing a whole narrative out of a patchwork of sources. Unlike another book about recovery, this is real. How addiction takes hold and spirals, and how small everyday things can overcome it. I really hate being trite, but this book really is about the 'triumph of the human spirit'.
David Carr is brave November 12, 2008
In a world willing to forgive it's celebrities anything, this kind of memoir is not what most journalists would be willing to write about themselves. Journalists are judged under a harsher light, and forgiven far less often than actors who never really had our trust to begin with.
David's walk through his own disaster is remarkably brave. He allows himself to be the story and in doing so risks so much. It is that risk that adds so much value to his tale.
Good Luck. The road doesn't end with the book.
The facts and fiction of memory November 10, 2008
THE NIGHT OF THE GUN is a unique look at drug abuse and memory. NY Times reporter, David Carr, literally reports on his life as a drug user. His memory of his days abusing drugs is hazy. He remembers many parts of his life as a drug addict differently than how the events actually happened.
It is unique in a memoir for a writer to question his own memories. I am fascinated by the idea of memory and the way in which different people remember the same event. Even those who do not abuse substances often remember events incorrectly. People unconsciously change the past to suit their present. It's rare for a non-fiction writer to acknowledge the inherent faults in human memory.
As simple a tale of substance abuse, this autobiography does not stand out from the thousands of other books written about addiction. However, this book definitely stands out that it examines how humans remember their pasts.
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