New York Times Reviews — And Loves! — Timesman's Book

This fierce, self-lacerating tale opens on the morning after St. Patrick's Day, 1987, in Minneapolis. David Carr, a young newspaperman, is being issued a very blunt choice: go to rehab or be fired.

Mr. Carr tells us that the day before, answering the call of his "shanty Irish heritage" and his "genetic loading," he celebrated with green beer, Irish whiskey and cocaine. Lots of cocaine. On the day itself, and not for the first time, he shows up for work as an addled wreck. The editor issues his ultimatum. Mr. Carr replies with surly defiance, "I'm not done yet."

He is fired, and goes down to the street with "a rush of sudden liberation." He calls a friend from college days, and they go off drinking. In a blues bar many blocks from his downtown turf, Mr. Carr drinks hard, gobbles down some pills, follows up with cocaine, is thrown out of the bar and assaults his friend in the parking lot. The friend drives off, and Mr. Carr is left alone, at 31, with 34 cents in his pocket. Thus begins "The Night of the Gun," the sort of narrative that Katherine Anne Porter, in a different context, once described as "the downward path to wisdom."

Today Mr. Carr is an excellent media columnist for The New York Times, his writing full of that special journalistic energy that is driven by a combination of reporting and intelligence. During his apprenticeship in Minneapolis, he tells us, his talent was obvious, but so was his gift for self-destruction. In this account he was definitely not done yet.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[jukesgrrl]

And they wonder why people hate the New York Times?