The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.

By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 7, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Nonfiction. By David Carr. Simon & Schuster, $26. Grade: B

Book in a nutshell: There is no shortage of addiction memoirs on the market - see James Frey or Augusten Burroughs - but New York Times reporter Carr has a slightly different slant on the surrender-my-life-to-drugs genre. After his sixth trip to rehab, Carr decided to write about his two-plus decades of addiction from a journalistic perspective. That meant grabbing a notebook, video camera and tape recorder, and revisiting the people with whom he experienced the most darkness in his life, and getting them to share their recollections.

It's a canny move because, let's face it, drug addicts don't have the most reliable memory.

Carr discovered plenty of unpleasant stuff about his past, not just his drug use, but his beating up women, pulling a gun on a friend (hence the title) and countless brushes with the law and jobs lost while burning the candle at both ends.

The Night of the Gun is extremely well written, but it's not an easy book to read. At times you feel you need pot holders to turn the page, and one can only imagine the torture Carr went through to type it.

In a nutshell, Carr spiraled from high school pot use to snorting cocaine in college, then smoking it and shooting it into his veins. He went through a number of dysfunctional romantic relationships and ended up siring twin girls with a woman who also was heavily into drugs. (The girls were born premature.)

How does Carr explain his reckless behavior? "As long as the coke held out, it was mostly silence and goofy grins of satisfaction," he writes. "The high would last fifteen or twenty minutes, and then the synapses would begin making a fuss - a head full of little baby birds with their beaks open and crying out for more."

Best tidbit: The book's most poignant passage involves Carr strapping the months-old twins into car seats, then leaving them parked outside a dealer's house while he went inside to get a fix. The moment he ingested the first hit, he forgot about the babies until he returned to the car hours later.

Pros: Carr is very good at describing both the addictive high of drugs (it almost seems like a Disneyland of the mind) and the dark paranoia that accompanies addiction. There are times you don't want to turn the page and confront more stupidity and ugliness.

Cons: The ugliness can be oppressive. Also, there can be a rather clinical tone just beneath the surface of a story culled in part from police and treatment reports.

Final word: Yes, The Night of the Gun has a happy ending. (Carr sobered up and ended up writing for the Times). Yet getting this can leave you feeling in need of some rehab yourself.

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