The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own - Hardcover

Carr, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416541527 ISBN 13: 9781416541523

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416541527
• ISBN 13: 9781416541523
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400