title: The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own.
author:  David Carr 
description: "[A] fierce, self-lacerating tale....writing full of that special journalistic energy that is driven by a combination of reporting and intelligence."<br /> --Pete Hamill, <i>The New York Times</i><br /><br />"[A] remarkable narrative of redemption...He writes with grace and precision...With grit and a recovering user's candor, Mr. Carr has written an arresting tale..."<br /> -- Edward Kosner, <i>The Wall Street Journal </i><br /><br />"3 stars. It's an odyssey you'll find hard to forget."<br /> -- Kim Hubbard, <i>People</i><br /><br />"<i>The Night of the Gun</i> is about as dark and murky as dark and murky get. And though it is one of the most eloquent accounts of the seduction and snare of addiction, what's gotten lost in the water-cooler discussion about Carr's misadventures -- including drug peddling as well as his bout with cancer -- is that this book, in its sharp, serrated prose, is a meditation on how memory works (but mostly how it doesn't), a man's obsessive effort to get at his life's true narrative using the skills he's honed as a reporter, the one piece of his life that didn't combust."<br /> -- George Lynell, <i>L.A. Times</i><br /><br />"After years of abuse, the memoir has found its white knight, galloping in to show how a personal story can be engrossing, shocking and true. Mr. Carr's book...practically issues a challenge to thosecurrent reigning kings -- David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Ishmael Beah -- of the memoir genre: You get a video camera and tape recorder, and retrace the steps of your life. Will your story sound the same?...It adds up to a riveting, improbable story. More important, Mr. Carr has produced a work that stands to revive the excitement and thrill of reading about reporting. It's <i>All the President's Men</i>, but about a dude from Minnesota with a drug habit."<br /> -- <i>New York Observer Review of Books</i><br /><br />"There may be no memoirist who has more skillfully used journalistic tools to reconstruct his own life than <i>New York Times</i> media columnist David Carr in his remarkable and harrowing book, <i>The Night of the Gun</i>....<b>A</b>."<br /> --Jennifer Reese, <i>Entertainment Weekly</i><br /><br />"<i>The Night of the Gun</i> is in part a writerly exercise in defense and disarmament--memoir in the throes of an existential crisis. But that does not prevent it from being a great read. This is largely because, in using his reporter's chops to investigate his own past, Carr taps the very skills that propelled him to survive. His method, as much as his madness, is the story."<br /> --<i>Time</i><br /><br />"He never asks for sympathy, but his skill and the way he has told his story deserves respect. <i>The Night of the Gun</i> is an amazingly honest and fascinating memoir."<br /> -- Myrna Blyth, <i>National Review</i><br /><br />"<i>The Night of the Gun</i>, is the fierce, funny, disturbing, brutally honest, and ultimately uplifting story of Carr's decent into a self-inflicted hell and a bumpy return to life. Part investigative page-turner, part redemption song, part meditation on the mercurial nature of memory, <i>The Night of the Gun</i> pulls a besmirched genre out of the gutter, drags it through rehab, and returns it to a respectable place in society. And, if there is any justice, a place on the best-seller list." <br /> -- Arianna Huffington on Veryshortlist.com
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  ## The Scarecrow
  
  
    
  
  
  ### Michael Connelly
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. Forced to take a
  buy-out from the LA Times as the newspaper grapples with dwindling readership
  and revenues, he's got 30 days left on the job. His last assignment? Training
  his replacement, a low cost reporter just out of J-school who couldn't find
  the police station if it was right next store to the Times, which it is. But
  Jack has other plans for his exit. He is going to go out with a bang – a final
  story that will win the newspaper journalism's highest honor – a Pulitzer
  prize. Jack focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer from the
  projects who has confessed to police that he brutally raped and strangled one
  of his crack clients. Jack convinces Alonzo's mother to cooperate with his
  investigation into the possibility of her son's innocence. But she has fallen
  for the oldest reporter's trick in the book. 