 2008-11-30 - Carr
This 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 overall plot is familiar and reminds me of "The Wolf of Wall Street" or "Rigged". Though instead of being about a financier, it is about a journalist.
Carr acknowledges that writing a memoir is somewhat self indulgent and audacious, which helps add an element of humility to an otherwise rather depressing story.
 2008-11-29 - 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 creative writing exercises...while the book might prove to have some therapeutic value to others with similar problems, as a work of non-fiction overall, I didn't find it worth the time.
2008-11-28 - Intriguing Premise but a little dry
The 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 and mistakes/missteps rather he goes into detail and is apologetic. The author did a good job of recounting these experiences and I actually could imagine what was going on.
What is bad about the book: It jumps around and it difficult to follow at times. The book is not one that I would be reading for deep thinking and looking for the undertones and messages however, I found myself taking more time to figure out what was going on than I should have. Also, I found the ending to be very abrupt and some critical investigations lacked sufficient detail for the account to be complete in my opinion.
 2008-11-27 - an eye-opener for the non-addict
If 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.
David Carr did some serious stuff: not just alcohol, but cocaine, crack, and injected drugs. But before that, he was a pretty good journalist. And after that, he became a pretty good journalist again. So he decided to investigate his own past as if he were investigating any other story. He found out that what he thought had happened was not exactly what had happened, according to the friends and family members he interviewed fifteen years later: it was both worse and better. Read the book to find out what he really did. Ok, I'll tell you: he pointed a gun in his best friend's face, but he did not kidnap his children away from their mother.
Amazingly, his kids turned out pretty well and even went to college. There are lots of grainy snapshots that show beautiful blond babies (twins) growing up to be presumably nice girls. He also got married to a nice woman. He also relapsed. One of the times, not surprisingly, was in New Orleans, right after Katrina, when he was covering the aftermath. Who wouldn't want a drink? But later, he went to Jazz Fest and found an AA meeting to attend every day of Jazz Fest, so he stayed sober that time and presumably had a good time.
The key seems to be: go to a meeting every day if necessary, once a week if that's all you can manage. But don't stop going to AA meetings, even if you've been clean for a long time.
The other message is: smart people can go seriously off the wagon, and we mustn't enable them, yet we can always hope that they'll come back to the land of the living, and when they do, we can help them with jobs and childcare, etc. And we might be rewarded: the thug can turn into a (mostly) model citizen and a productive worker and a good parent.
I forgot to mention that this book is very well-written. But a lot of typos slipped by the editor.
2008-11-26 - Didn't I read this already?
I'm sorry, but I just couldn't read this book. I tried, but I kept thinking "haven't I read this story before?" Sure, Carr tries to put a new twist on it, but it didn't do it for me.
Why'd I give it three stars when I couldn't even read more than a few chapters? Well, I admit to having a totally subjective, visceral reaction. I did not care. I couldn't bring myself to care.
But, others have enjoyed this book and I don't want to put anyone off. Is that helpful? I don't know. And since this is, in essence, a story of redemption, if it speaks to someone who's suffering, I can't dismiss it out of hand.
In spite of the author's claim to unflinching honesty, the writing is aloof. Carr's turning the tables on himself as a reporter would explain this. It reads as a memoir noir (a genre I don't believe exists).
Ah, something new! Then why does it feel so familiar?
There are simply too many drunkalogs and drugalogs out there. To rise above the fray - that would take a small miracle, and this book does not contain that.
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