Reviews

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

mcleary's review against another edition

4.0

I love train wreck autobiographies, dark tales of the descent into addiction and squalor and shame and debasement. Perhaps it's because it's a vicarious way of living that life without getting the needle marks. David Carr's tale doesn't disappoint. He falls hard...very hard. From relatively harmless and fun booze and LSD fuelled hijinks to hardcore addiction to smoking crack, wife beating, joblessness, hopelessness and paranoia. Carr certainly lived a particular kind of life, fairly common perhaps, but his memoir is honestly and tenderly written with some interesting ruminations on truth and memory.

natasha86's review against another edition

dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective

4.75

Very intelligently written

vale1049's review against another edition

challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

3.0

ohmonster's review against another edition

Better read as prose than in audio form. 

sctittle's review against another edition

3.0

The premise of this memoir is brilliant: how do we remember the past, how do others in our past remember us, and how much truth lives within the facts? I applaud the late Mr. Carr for approaching the story of his recovery as if it were a news story he was researching and writing. It makes the book stand out from all the other recovery memoirs out there. But the story he tells overshadows his ingenious technique. And it is an incredible story. But you can't be objective about your own life, no matter how hard you try, when the details of that life hit the highs and lows experienced by David Carr. It saddens me to say this, especially after I did a little research and found out what a lovely man he was, and how much he helped other journalists and writers and addicts. Definitely worth reading because his is an incredible story. I don't know how else he could have written it to make it more captivating, but I totally appreciate this approach.

kirsten0929's review against another edition

4.0

[2008] One of the best memoirs of addiction I've read. Explores the concept of memory, more specifically, the unreliability of memory, and structures the book around that. He recounts those years of addiction as he remembers them but incorporates interviews and conversations with people who were there, legal documents, newspaper articles, etc. to self-correct. Appropriately, this is a journalistic approach to this journalist's work. I think his writing is fantastic. Sharp, edgy, funny at times, very vidid. He was gracious in his representations of the others in the book, brutally honest about himself. I see some reviewers describe him as arrogant and self-aggrandizing, but I did not find that at all. He may have been so in real life but if it was described in the book at all, it was not presented as complimentary.

lastpaige111's review against another edition

5.0

I taught this book to college students I loved it so much.

Because people struggling with addiction often suffer blackouts, it's nearly impossible for them to write truthful accounts of what they did while under the influence. So David Carr interviews people who witnessed his behavior and can tell HIM what he did.

An amazing and humble text by a leader in journalism we lost too soon.

coleycole's review against another edition

4.0

Carr, a well-respected journalist and recovering addict, wrote this memoir by applying reporting techniques to his life, going back and interviewing people who knew him when he was a junkie. He's most revelatory when he steps back and talks objectively about memory, truth and addiction. He questions his own impulse to add "one more addiction story" to the bunch, with or without the prop of reporting and researching his own past, but I thought that this made all the difference. By doing the book in this way, he discovers that, because of his addictions to crack, cocaine and alcohol, he did things that he never thought he was capable of -- despite the fact that he already knew a lot of despicable facts about himself (having gone through the 4th of the 12 steps more than a few times). I'd recommend it, but I think I need to take a break from books (fiction or non) with protagonists who destroy themselves via substances.

happeningalmond's review against another edition

dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.0

ilovehummus6's review against another edition

dark funny medium-paced

3.5

There’s something maybe not charming, but endearing, about Carr’s unwillingness to be apologetic. He admits the part of him that misses the lifestyle he once had, the part of him that would rather not believe the things he’s forcibly rewritten in memory. I liked a lot about this memoir, I just wish the plot had felt more tightly constructed & purposeful. It felt a lot like self-indulgent nostalgia at some points (but even then, enjoyable. Entertaining.) And I’m totally obsessed with the concept of the book, which biases my rating.