The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wonderful, gritty read!

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

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