The Night of the Gun (2009)
A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own.
David Carr
rating good
type nonfiction/autobiography e-book
2021/02/27 Carr turns a harsh yet curious journalistic lens onto his own past, and the result is spectacular. He weaves together brutally honest interviews with the people around him on his journey with self-reflective, realistically limited insights and a perfectly tuned sense of gravity to produce a work of utmost authenticity.
- You know what you know— what Descartes calls “the holy music of the self”
- On addiction: “Absolution from end-stage chemical obsession tends to force otherwise faithless men to their knees.”
- “In a broader sense, addiction can be enormously simplifying... It leads to a life that is, in a way, remarkably organized. What are we doing today? Exactly what we did yesterday, give or take.”
- Emerson’s credo: moderation in all things, especially moderation
- On life going by so fast: “...I was terrified of missing anything. I wondered whether my own personal velocity, the mad to-ing and fro-ing of my everyday life, was a fearful response to the thought that life would get away from me.”
- The fallibility of memory
- “You can’t become normal by pretending you are.”