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The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life - His Own (Unabridged) | 
 enlarge | Author: David Carr
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $26.21
You Save: $23.74 (48%)
Rating:  149 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B001DVZU6Y
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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 144 more reviews...
 David Carr turns the gun on himself -- and lives to tell the harrowing tale July 27, 2008
Jesse Kornbluth (New York)
76 out of 86 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.
 A looooonnnnng night August 21, 2008
Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA)
27 out of 31 found this review helpful
The concept behind David Carr's memoir is intriguing. Stoned and drunk for much of his early life, the fact that he couldn't trust his own memories was brought home to him when he was shown that he completely misremembered an incident with a gun (hence the book's title). So, reporter that he is, he set out to interview people who knew him back in the day. He became an investigative reporter tracking down the young David Carr. Along the way, he discovered lots of things he said and did, but of which he has either no or distorted recollections.
So the angle that Night of the Gun takes is attractive. That's the good news. The bad news is that Carr can't quite deliver. For starters, the book is way too long and so the episodes Carr recounts (often with cinematic speed and compactness) tend to become repetitious. So there's a lot of words but not a lot of depth. Moreover, the lack of depth is reflected in the tough guy, Mickey Spillane style Carr chooses to write in, a style that comes across as inauthentic and, within just a few pages, incredibly annoying. Perhaps the point of the style is to create a living-on-the-edge ambience. But it doesn't work very well.
Ultimately, and most seriously, it's difficult to see what the point of Carr's book is. Is it to draw attention to the mysterious ways in which our memories deceive us? But if so, there's precious little real reflection on the issue, and most of it consists of unenlightening one-liners. (What a lost opportunity.) Is it to impress upon us the terrible things that drug and alcohol addictions do? But surely this has been done a bazillion times already in other memoirs as well as in films and novels (read anything by Hubert Selby, Jr., for example). Is the book intended to be a sort of celebrity confessional? But if so, it falls short of the mark because Mr. Carr simply isn't a celebrity.
I'm glad that Carr has straightened out his life. But I'm afraid his book rates no more than two and a half stars. For more authentic and better written recent memoirs of the addicted life, I recommend Lee Stringer's Grand Central Winter, David Sheff's Beautiful Boy, or James Salant's Leaving Dirty Jersey.
Good, but David Carr's narcissism makes it a bit rough to read at times. August 12, 2008
Peter Treitler (NJ, USA)
13 out of 23 found this review helpful
As a former addict and one with a story that has a lot of parallels to that of David Carr, I enjoyed reading this book. I was able to relate to a lot of what he went through and he did a great job of putting the misery of low-bottom addiction into words. My only complaint with this book is that Mr. Carr narcissistic personality is evident in The Night of the Gun. The way he told his story just made him sound full of himself, not humble like many in recovery are. Still a good read, worth checking out.
RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "THERE WAS NO TIME TO PANIC... BUT THE PANIC CAME ANYWAY." August 6, 2008
Rick Goldstein (Danville, Ca, USA)
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
This gripping memoir by New York Times reporter David Carr is like a three-hundred-eighty-five page-pre-paid ticket for a roller coaster ride to drug-hell. Once the reader climbs aboard, this roller coaster travels straight down ninety-percent of the time. The author will lead you through the hellish remains of the way his life used to be... going from pot and alcohol, to cocaine addiction... and then to the final barren chamber, in the deepest darkest, dungeon of all addictive drug hell... smoking crack cocaine. He was in such bad shape, that even all of his main drug buddies, undid their seat belts and jumped off the ride... as the roller coaster and author flew way off the rails. As David attempts to tell his story... he suddenly realizes that he can't remember what really happened to him. He starts off telling his "romanticized" version of his drug-crazed exploits... but when he finds his old friends and family members (that actually lived through the self-destructive atomic haze) he very quickly found out, that what he thought he remembered, differed completely from the other "survivor's recollection... including the night one of his best friends put a gun to his head... as alluded to in the title. The only problem with that scenario, is that his friend contacted twenty years after... states that David pulled the gun on him. David quite "clearly" remembers that he never owned a gun. But, then he tracks down another friend from the past who tells him, that twenty years ago, David had him go to his house... to get his gun out... before the cops... that the author was fleeing from... got there to search his house.
The outright marvelous writing and colloquialisms that the author paints his story around, are certifiable genius, and makes the potential reader hope the author continues to publish more books of this genre, whether in autobiographical or novel form, before you've even read one-quarter of this book. When the author realizes that he can no longer vouch for any of his raucous, debauchery, depraved, self-destructive former life... he decides to buy video and recording equipment, and hunt down the role players from his past, and interview them, to get their perspective on his time in self-imposed hell. And thus the statement:
*** "PEOPLE REMEMBER WHAT THEY CAN LIVE WITH MORE OFTEN THAN HOW THEY LIVED." ***************************
As the author's drug use spiraled out of control his innate writing talent would give him temporary employment until employers couldn't look the other way anymore. In hindsight David says: "SOMETIMES ADDICTION SEEMS MORE LIKE POSSESSION, A DEATH GRIP FROM SATAN THAT REQUIRES SUPERNATURAL INTERVENTION." If there is a bottom that is lower than "BOTTOMING-OUT" then David takes you there with a little help from his friends. Is it possible to descend any lower as a human being, than when Anna was pregnant with the author's twin girls and "SHE WAS USING CRACK WHEN HER WATER BROKE, SIGNALING THAT THE TWINS HAD ARRIVED TWO-AND-A-HALF MONTHS EARLY. I WAS THE ONE WHO BROUGHT HER THOSE DRUGS."
Throughout this guided tour of soulless descent, the author demonstrates literary "chops" that the leading writers of detective yarns could only hope to emulate. In describing one of his former dope dealers he says: "PHIL COULD BE FUN AS HELL WHEN HE WASN'T "CONDUCTING", WHICH IS WHAT HE CALLED DEALING, FULL OF STREET LORE, PHILOSOPHY, AND MIND GAMES. SOME GUYS LOOK TOUGH. SOME GUYS TALK TOUGH. SOME GUYS ARE TOUGH. PHIL HIT FOR THE CYCLE." A simple off-hand throw-away comment about cokeheads: "the eyes that saw too much because they did not close often enough." A simple off the cuff statement about a stop on a typical night out would make Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais proud: "WE WENT BAR HOPPING AND ENDED UP AT "STAND UP FRANK'S, THE KIND OF PLACE WHERE A SCREWDRIVER WAS A GLASS FULL OF VODKA THAT THE BARTENDER WHISPERED THE WORDS "ORANGE JUICE" OVER BEFORE HANDING IT TO YOU."
This is an immensely talented writer... who doesn't need to make up street-jargon... he lived it. If he stays clean... and doesn't relapse back into the world he already lived in... but just truly discovered on this follow-up journey... that for example... he was actually in treatment centers five times... even though for the last twenty years he thought he was only in four times... then the reading public as a whole... has an awful lot of exciting literature to read and enjoy in the future.
Remember David... ONE DAY AT A TIME!
The Epiphanies Are Fascinating, and The Scabs Gnarly August 9, 2008
prisrob (New EnglandUSA)
10 out of 16 found this review helpful
"Carr takes as a given that our memories are suspect, compromised by the understandable desire to make a coherent story from shapeless experience, to cast ourselves in the role of hero (or dashing villain), and to inject a bit of drama when the plot begins to sag." Jennifer Reese
David Carr, media critic for the New York Times has written an extraordinary book of his life of addiction. He tells the truth, but not enough of himself is disclosed. I don't get a feel for the man until later in the book. True he researched this book like a journalist- he traced all of his old contacts and interviewed them because his memory was faulty at best. His depicitions and summaries of his friends and lovers are all well drawn out and illustrated. The story is not pretty. He started out as a drunk- one of 3 or 4 in his immediate family, by the way. He then moved on to cocaine and finally injecting it. Drugs were his life, he lived for them. His friends were the ones who helped him get his drugs. His girlfriends, part of the crowd. And he worked to buy the drugs,got fired, somehow got drugs again and found a job and on and on. His girlfriend Anna, got pregnant and on the night he gave her a needle to inject cocaine, her water broke. The twins were born 2 1/2 months early. He still did drugs and so did she. He gave up drugs the night he left his twins in the car in the middle of winter to go buy his drugs- he left them in the car for 5 minutes or was it hours- who knows?
David Carr goes straight for many years. Bringing up his twins alone for six years, meets the love of his life, marries, has another child, moves along on his journalism carrer. The portrait of his family, his twin girls and wife are revealing and insightful. And, then, well things were too good, so he starts drinking again. Up until this portion of the story, it is pretty cut and dry and sometimes boring. The latter part of his life with his new wife and children are the most interesting portions. He and his family are brought to life. I start to care about this man and the women in it. His story is straight and true, and not as hyped up and gaudy as James Frey's story of addiction. David Carr finally comes to life and in just in time.
"The epiphanies are fascinating, and the scabs gnarly
Even when Carr does eventually enter rehab and make good, his tale veers unnervingly from the familiar and reassuring arc of the recovery narrative. Maybe that's what happens when you stick to the facts. Carr is as immoderate in his drive to unearth every detail of his sordid past as he once was to hoover up that last grain of coke on the floor. You may not forgive Carr his flamboyant misdeeds as readily as he seems to forgive himself, all the while patting himself on the back for his brutal honesty. But he is an undeniably brilliant and dogged journalist. "Jennifer Reese
Recommended. prisrob 08-09-08
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