| 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
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Avg. Customer Rating:  110 reviews
Sales Rank: 6620
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 105 more reviews...
 Thoughtful, wrenching, but in the end just too disorienting November 22, 2008
The premise of the book is an excellent one - the veracity of the memoirs of addicts tend to fall into A Million Little Pieces when examined too closely, so the writer applied his journalistic skills and, more importantly, his journalistic integrity to the story of his life as an addict. The result is compelling and interesting, a real page-turner.
There are a few weird side effects of this method, though.
For starters, the book isn't in anything resembling chronological order. One chapter will occur years before the next, and people who show up in one chapter suddenly show up three chapters later in a different context without much explanation.
There's also little by way of dialogue and the writer often stops to tell us how little he actual remembers about the events he just spent several paragraphs describing. It's refreshing to have a narrator come out and tell you just how unreliable they are, but it does make you wonder why you're bothering to read if the events described aren't trustworthy, and the lack of dialogue creates a pace that's a bit too steady.
I would have preferred to see the book use a few different formats for presenting the interview information - if an interview was done on audio tape, give us a transcript instead of another set of paragraphs. If there were pictures taken, shows us pictures. I'm not asking for a hummingbirdlike movement from format to format, just a little variety. The source materials evidently there, so I don't know what the same approach was taken throughout.
I know my copy's an advance readers copy, but there are a lot of spelling and formatting mistakes that should've been caught by any reasonable editor long beforehand as well.
It's still worth a good read if you're in the mood for a memoir that'll move you, but buckle in. It's a bit of a bumpy ride.
 Couldn't Get THrough It November 21, 2008
This memoir started with a great premise and a better opening salvo. The author is a recovered crack addict. When speaking to an old friend, he recalled the night the friend pulled a gun on him. The friend corrected him, telling him that he never owned a gun and that it was the author who had pulled the weapon. Great opening. From there the author, a NY Times reporter, decided to investigate his drug-addled life the way he would any other story. A terrific concept.
Thus began an endless series of interviews with people whose first names only were given. The name thing made the book even more difficult to follow than it was already was as the chapters and interviews were not laid out chronologically. Most of the chapters (admittedly I only could get halfway through) were incredibly redundant. This not only diminished the enjoyment, but added to the confusion and muddle which drowned out the message. Every "friend", "fellow user" or dealer sounded the same after a while.
The author was a bit disingenuous at times, also. Was it necessary to use only "Tom" when describing a large man who went to Hollywood and married "Roseanne" and produced her TV show? If he was going to call Tom Arnold out, he should have had the guts to name him outright.
The book was a disappointment after it grabbed me so hard with the opening gun ambit. A good editor could have pared this down to make it a much tighter, and therefore more meaningful book. The author has a lot to say and a lot to say that could probably be helpful to those in his prior condition, those around addicts and who love them, and those who just want to know aboout addiction and its culture. Unfortunately, the message was subsumed by the repetitious minutae of countless redundant anecdotes presented in a haphazrd manner.
Proof good sometimes comes of bad November 21, 2008
I found the first half of this book quite confusing. Oh, it is written very well. Perhaps the problem is that I am a bit more used to nonfiction, just the facts, but the entire first half of this book is David Carr's memoir on what a mess up he was, with lots of drugs and alcohol. Maybe I was supposed to be confused, like in those movies about people with split personalities told from the 1st person. David was exploring how his memories were faulty, and well, of course they were, he was living a life of a heavy duty substance abuser. I found it very hard to read - I kept having flashbacks to my teenage years reading "GO ASK ALICE."
The second part improved and was inspiring, and it read much better for me. Yes, there is hope even for the most confused among us. Really good can indeed come out of really rotten. Junkies can find great women and marry them and have very nice, even admirable lives and contribute a good deal to the world in spite of themselves.
It is extremely well written and the accounts are crazy realistic and thought compelling. IF you are more interested in characters than facts,and love David Carr, or at least admire his work, I suspect you can easily follow it and enjoy it. If you are a fact person though,and tend to prefer linear thinking like me, don't be surprised if you struggle through the first 2-3 chapters and feel a bit like a deer in the headlights.
One last gasp from crowded addict memoir market November 20, 2008
Sometimes harrowing, sometimes self-indulgent, The Night of the Gun is at the very least always INTERESTING. David Carr dives into the now tired world of tell-all memoirs about drug addiction and sleazy living - I truly tire of this trend - but he does it with a twist.
Here Carr, who is now an investigative reporter and writer, investigates HIMSELF. His years as a complete mess left his memory a complete mess, too. His was a life filled with falsehoods, foggy memories, and lies. Lies even HE started to believe.
So Carr, who has long-since turned around his life, aimed his skills at himself in an effort to uncover the truth about who he was and what he did. The result is a deeply personal, often ugly look at a man's spiral into oblivion and rise back to a productive life of love and normality.
I'll be honest, there is a part of me that wonders, "Who cares? Who is this guy and why should he matter to me? Even more, why should yet another story about being a loser and an addict, then recovering, be of interest?"
And the truth is, I don't have answers to those questions.
But I do know that Carr's journey at the very least illustrates how easy a life can spiral out of control, and shows us how even years later the mistakes of our past can be a dragging weight on our new life. It's also a book about memories and how we lie to ourselves.
This whole addict memoir thing is a way, WAY overcrowded market, but Carr, at least, manages to mine one last gasp from it.
 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.
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