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.
Too long...January 8, 2009 I picked up Night of the Gun because it had a cool cover. Sadly, the memoir isn't anything extraordinary, even with the added gimmick of using taped interviews to retell the writer's own story. The book is split into two parts. The first half is chapter after chapter of wild partying and general mayhem in which the author spirals into the abyss of addiction. The second half is about, you guessed it, his recovery and return to a somewhat normal existence. Ok, we get it. You overcame. But did that really require 400 pages?
Others have said it better.January 8, 2009 Sadly, I can't expand on what has already been shared.
I thought this book would be riveting, but was only mildly interested. While the idea grabbed my attention, the execution left much to be desired. Carr spends a lot of time giving too many details that only seem to confuse the reader and make for extra long chapters with little story movement.
One moment he seems to be coming to a point, the next he is going too far off track to regain my interest. Finally, after devoting my required 50 pages, I put the book down, unable to see its merits.
Better than average memoirJanuary 6, 2009 When writing "The Night of the Gun," his memoir of substance abuse, New York Times reporter David Carr interviewed people in his life who witnessed his descent. Good idea. Even before James Frey's very public dressing down for fabricating the events in his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," I think most perceptive readers questioned the truthfulness of the genre. Far too many people have written "memoirs" in which they triumphantly survive the most horrific circumstances to be believed. Frankly, I'm stumped by their appeal. Unless a memoir is the work of someone who has accomplished something that already brought them into the public eye, my interest in their troubles is minimal.
My interest in Carr's troubles is minimal too, although I have heard of him, read him too, in the online edition of the New York Times. His writing skills go a long way in making "Night of the Gun" interesting, and thanks to the documentation he provides, its more believable than most of the titles in this genre. It's certainly riveting, but it could also have benefitted from more editing. It's too long and too repetitive for my tastes, but for those interested in the catharsis (or whatever) they seek from these memoirs, it has more merit than most.
Brian W. Fairbanks
Night of the GunJanuary 6, 2009 The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His OwnAn eye-openning account of an addict's thought processes and behaviors by a funny, knowledgable, and interesting journalist. The book Night of the Gun is easy to read and the story is difficult to hear. I laughed and suffered as I read about Carr's life as an addict. I have recommended this book to my therapist friends to increase their understanding of and effectiveness with their clients, their friends, and their family members.
Finding the Way from Memory to TruthJanuary 4, 2009 To avoid comparisons with James Frey (the addict who fictionalized parts of his life story in "A Million Little Pieces"), author David Carr takes a different approach to truth-telling in his own story of addiction in "The Night of the Gun." Carr gets to the facts the way any good journalist (like Carr himself) would ferret out the truth--by returning to the scene of the crime and interviewing the witnesses.
Carr begins this journey with what he imagines to be the worse night of his life (the night of the gun in the title) and discovers memory is a tricky thing. While talking over this horrible event with his best friend, he learns that his recollection of the events is not exactly what occurred. In fact, the truth is even more bleak than he had recalled. So, too, is much of the rest of the story.
It's not a pretty tale, and while the brutal honesty of his examination is admirable, Carr is not an easy man to like. His self-centered view, his utter disregard for others, his brutality and violent behavior all make for some hard-going in this story. Even when Carr appears to have weathered the worst of life (conquering his addiction to cocaine, gaining control of parental responsibility for his daughters, becoming a successful journalist), there is still more horror to reveal.
The way Carr reaches the truth about all of this is to interview the people who populated his life, from famous comedians to streetwise addicts. Over a period of time, he reconstructed his past via videotaped interviews, medical records, police files, and a variety of other documentation. It's all compelling, but perhaps in the way you would rubberneck at an accident along the side of the road. It takes a strong stomach for the journey, but there are rewards along the way.
The book will surely be most interesting to recovered and recovering addicts or those who have a loved one who has gone down the same road as Carr. For the rest of us, the book still contains some interesting ideas and lessons about life, but it's a dark slog through the underside to get there, a journey not everyone will want to take. Perhaps most profound in this story is that what turned out to be the impetus for overcoming the overwhelming odds of addiction was a family and a willingness to work hard...and a desire for the truth about it all.
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