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by: David Carr  List Price: $26.00 Grab Discount Price: $17.16 You Save: $8.84 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 616.860092 EAN: 9781416541523 ISBN: 1416541527 Label: Simon & Schuster Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 400 Publication Date: August 05, 2008 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Studio: Simon & Schuster Sales Rank: 4267 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: Do we remember only the stories we can live with?
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. Discount Shopping 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 Average Rating:
 Rating: - Good, sometimes inconsistent book, but you have to be willing to self-examine with the authorI found myself liking The Night of The Gun more than I thought I would. The low points first: The number of interviews in the book could've been cut back, while some could've used more depth. There was some repetition between interviews. The concept of memory as malleable wasn't taken much further than an observation about a quirk. It might have gone further, but it didn't. I enjoyed the book despite, maybe because of, some problems. David Carr has an interesting voice ... Read More Rating:  - CarrThis book is Carr's journey back into his life as a drug addict based on interviews with current and former friends. Carr is currently a successful journalist for the New York Times but, prior to that, he was a major drug user who accidentally got a girl pregnant and wound up the primary custodian of twins. He went in and out of rehab multiple times, eventually remarried, and came clean. Just when things were looking up he was diagnosed with cancer, which he eventually beat. The ... Read More Rating:  - Well, I certainly don't see much worth getting......excited about...a reformed alcoholic and drug addict shares his history...my biggest objection is that everything was so predictable -- twenty pages in and I knew pretty much how the rest would turn out...my next objection is that it is terribly overwritten -- e.g. descibing addction as "more like possession, a death grip from Satan that requires supernatural intervention."...sorry, but that's just trying too hard and so much of the book sounds like something gleaned from a collection of amateur ... Read More Rating: - Intriguing Premise but a little dryThe idea of this book is that the author is writing an in-depth study into his own life. I found it rather interesting that he remembered so little of the details that he undertook an investigation process to get the complete story. Thus, he revisited all of the colorful characters that he ran into during his train wreck of an existence, who sometimes had much different recollections than the author did himself. What is good about the book: The author doesn't sugar coat his wrong doings ... Read More Rating: - an eye-opener for the non-addictIf you're not a drunk or a crackhead, this book can help you understand their world. No doubt you know one, or even have one in your family: the person who throws away jobs, marriages, and even children in order to feed their habit. It's really, really hard to understand how this happens, and really upsetting to watch somebody self-destruct in this way. David Carr is an unusually articulate and self-aware addictive personality, and this book is sort of a guide to the underworld of the addict's life. Read More Browse for similar items by category:
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