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David Carr

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own Hardcover – August 5, 2008

by David Carr (Author)

4.4 1,075 ratings

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A confessional account of the author's struggles with addiction traces his rise from a crack house regular to a columnist for The New York Times, describing his experiences with rehabilitation, cancer, and single parenthood. 150,000 first printing.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

August 5, 2008
Dimensions

6.75 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

1416541527
ISBN-13

978-1416541523
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Editorial Reviews

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

From Publishers Weekly

An intriguing premise informs Carr's memoir of drug addiction—he went back to his hometown of Minneapolis and interviewed the friends, lovers and family members who witnessed his downfall. A successful, albeit hard-partying, journalist, Carr developed a taste for coke that led him to smoke and shoot the drug. At the height of his use in the late 1980s, his similarly addicted girlfriend gave birth to twin daughters. Carr, now a New York Times columnist, gives both the lowlights of his addiction (the fights, binges and arrests) as well as the painstaking reconstruction of his life. Soon after he quit drugs, he was thrown for another loop when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately, the book is less a real investigation of his life than an anecdotal chronicle of wild behavior. What's more, his clinical approach (he videotaped all his interviews), meant to create context, sometimes distances readers from it. By turns self-consciously prurient and intentionally vague, Carr tends to jump back and forth in time within the narrative, leaving the book strangely incoherent. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

"Every hangover begins with an inventory," Carr, a columnist for the Times, writes in this bracingly honest memoir. In sharp and sometimes poetic prose, the author takes a detailed inventory of his years of drug addiction, chronicling the slide from drinking and marijuana use during his teen years in Minneapolis to shooting cocaine and smoking crack while trying to maintain his life as a reporter and the father of twin girls. Carr is meticulous in the investigation of his past, reconstructing events with the aid of police reports, magazine rejection letters, and more than sixty interviews with friends, former dealers, and fellow-addicts. His journalistic skills are on full display as he works to excavate the truth from his often hazy memories. He evinces genuine remorse for his frequently reprehensible behavior and succeeds in creating something more than merely another entry in what he terms the "growing pile of junkie memoirs."
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine

Addiction memoirs are about the last thing most book critics want to read; even the good ones usually—and necessarily—follow a narrative pattern determined by the drugs themselves. All reviewers agreed that David Carr manages to break the mold by injecting his contemporary reporter persona into the tale, adding new insight into the situation of the addict. This alone distinguishes the book from others in the genre. Yet a few reviewers seemed a little weary of the overall addiction narrative and the nastiness that inevitably comes with it. Others picked up on a complaint best expressed by the New York Times: while Carr’s documentary approach provides deep insight into the life of an addict, it gives us remarkably little of his psyche, depriving the work of some of the vigor that has made memoirs like those of Augusten Burroughs so popular.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In the midst of his life of drug-induced mayhem, Carr visited a friend one night and threatened him with violence. A gun was involved, but did Carr threaten his friend with the gun, or did his friend threaten use of the gun in self-defense? To answer that question and hundreds of others, Carr—unwilling to rely on his iffy memory—used the tools of journalism to recount his past. He interviewed dealers, fellow addicts, women he had dated, employers, friends; he checked police reports and medical records. What he found was a personal history at times much uglier than he remembered. What he also found were redeeming moments: he was a good parent to his twin daughters, once he sobered up and got custody from their equally drug-addled mother, and he was a very talented writer with a career worth saving. He went on to an illustrious career at several alternative newspapers and the New York Times, all the while hanging on to the hard-learned and re-learned lessons of drug and alcohol addiction. This is a harrowing tale, brutally honest and more insightful and revealing than the standard drug-addict memoir. --Vanessa Bush

About the Author

David Carr is a reporter and the Media Equation columnist for The New York Times. Previously, he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine. From ’93 to ‘95 he was editor of the Twin Cities Reader in Minneapolis. He lives with his family in Montclair, New Jersey.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; 1st Simon & Schuster Hardcover edition (August 5, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1416541527
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1416541523
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #357,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #922 in Substance Abuse Recovery
- #1,827 in Author Biographies
- #11,808 in Memoirs (Books)

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4.4 1,075 ratings

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David Carr

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David Michael Carr (September 8, 1956 – February 12, 2015) was an American writer, columnist, and author. He wrote the Media Equation column and covered culture for The New York Times.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Ian Linkletter (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

1,075 global ratings

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IRONBOY

Powerful but occasionally disjointed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 8, 2011

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David Carr's premise is a brilliant one: an addict investigates the decadent past his memory cannot recall. Carr's journalistic instincts pay off with what he digs up about himself. However, his strengths as a journalist emerge as weaknesses in his narrative, primarily due to a lack of stylistic techniques. Journalism is
'just the fact's ma'am' and Carr gets those right in good enough fashion. But he falls short in terms of description, character, structure, and technique.

Each chapter inevitably leads off with a heavy quote. I'm all for quotes, but having them in every passage seems a bit like window dressing at times. Each chapter also begins with Carr's recollection of an event, then after a brief intro to the character he has found years later--usually only a sentence or two-- we then get the interviewed subject's rememberance. The structure is fine for awhile, but soon grows tired--all the people he interviews begin to sound the same. He admits to using tape recorders and video to capture their responses, and it certainly seems like responses are verbatim. This also grows tired, because the responses are mostly positive, which creates a weird dynamic. Carr's previous crackhead life and the Carr of today now hearing about how bad or good he was. It just gets confusing after awhile and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be horrified or admire the guy for surviving the horrors of addiction.

It's harrowing at times, with flashes of great writing, but once he has his twins and becomes a loving father harrowing turns to heartwarming and the book loses its focus and momentum. There are just too many small anecdotes that are loosely strung together and they all create a mish-mash of a story after awhile.

Carr's strengths are his unflinching honesty in his self-appraisal. But being the star of your own story has its shortcomings and at times Carr seems self-obsessed. He makes the effort to be self-deprecating of course, but not enough for my tastes.

A powerful book at times but not nearly enough linguistic craft or attention to style or literary finer points I was hoping for. Carr's prose is straightforward and fails to crackle. Ultimately the book fails to resonate--it's hard to have a whole lot of sympathy for someone who pumped out a few premature babies while a crackhead and had lots of family and public assistance to help raise them while he got himself back on his feet. Carr admits his shame for his acts, but that too, fails to resonate.

Ultimately the book lacks emotional and literary depth, and could have used a more unified and varied structure. A great effort and I look forward to seeing what else Carr has in his literary arsenal. Hopefully he'll turn it up a notch.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Theresa Alan

Well written. Will make you think.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 19, 2015

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I liked this book because there were a whole lot of quotable lines that made me think. It’s not exactly a page turner since you know going in how things turned out, but I like tales of people who got to ridiculous lows and then triumphed after a lot of hard work. I think one of the more important parts of his story is how much the state of Minnesota did to help him get him back on his feet, first by paying for him to get six months of treatment (after treatment had not worked for him four times previously—a fairly typical tale), then helping him with welfare and food stamps while he got back into the world of journalism, and then with medical care when he was diagnosed with cancer.

There were a few lines about him being a single dad that were beautiful. I liked how he pointed out that the hero-like qualities attributed to him as a single father were vastly different than if he’d been a single mother.

He writes, “Truly ennobling personal narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt them, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire.”

He does a compelling job of pointing out how our memories, particularly if our brains have marinated in alcohol and illegal chemicals for years, aren’t reliable. He did some despicable things, but he had a family that was familiar with substance abuse who helped when he was ready for help, and he worked to make amends and get in with the recovery community. His tale of relapse, unfortunately, was also not a new story, but still interesting and painful to read about. Again, he had good work and a caring family to help him back from the brink yet again, which is not a guarantee of success, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

13 people found this helpful

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Mahogany Ship

As honest and level-headed as a junkie memoir can be

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 18, 2015

Verified Purchase

The Night of the Gun is an excellent story of addiction and perseverance, brought to you by a superior writer. It is also a harrowing yet gripping foray into the making and unmaking of a dedicated cocaine enthusiast. Carr's journey to fact-check his own memoir is an interesting twist and acts as a much-needed and often-overlooked check on the memoir-writer's tendency to remember their lives in ways that are more flattering than they deserve.
Carr is aware of -- and mocks -- the tropes of the junkie memoir, but he does not transcend them entirely.
At times I felt like jabs at his fellow junkie ex-wife, the mother of his daughters, went from elucidating to score-settling. At some point toward the end of the book you realize this is a memoir of a person who is good at writing and who has had some really cool jobs but who didn't really accomplish anything except kicking dope and raising a family, which is admirable of course but I'm not sure it entitles him to a memoir. And it isn't clear that he thinks it does, either.
Yet it is here nonetheless, and in its honest accounting the reader will likely find themselves moved by this man's story. Triumphant? Not really. A terrible story well told? Absolutely.

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nessa10

quite a self-indulgent book, I read half a few ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

quite a self-indulgent book, I read half a few months ago but have never picked it up again...

Michael N.

Der Protagonist von "Page One"

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on May 18, 2012

Verified Purchase

Dies ist die Autobiographie von David Carr, dem Protagonisten aus dem Dokumentarfilm "Page One: Inside the New York Times". Man stelle sich vor, die in Deutschland bekannten Größen des Journalismus würden von ihrer Zeit als "Die Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" berichten. So ähnlich fühlt sich das jedenfalls an. Und wenn man bedenkt, dass auch der große Drehbuchschreiber Aaron Sorkin zugab, zehn Jahre seines Lebens der Kokain-Sucht geopfert zu haben, dann wird die Notwendigkeit einer solchen Lebensbeichte, die auch vor den tiefsten Niederungen keinen Halt macht, deutlich. Sehr empfehlenswert auch die zugehörige Webseite mit Videoaufzeichnungen der dem Buch zugrunde liegenden Interviews.

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Amazon Customer

Very good book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

For anyone who likes David Carr, this is a must read. A beautiful and powerful look into his history and coming to terms with the whole arc of his own life.

Dean Boland

Great read, highly recommend.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

Wonderful, gritty read!

Amazon Customer

A fine book - many layers deep and far beyond its ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

A fine book - many layers deep and far beyond its original topic of the effect of drugs and addiction.

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