FRESH AIR
Hostile womanizer, award-winning editor, crack addict, bad parent, coke dealer, New York Times columnist — David Carr has been all of those, sometimes simultaneously. But he doesn’t know all the details — or isn’t sure, after years of telling and retelling colorful anecdotes about himself, that he remembers them right. So for his memoir The Night of the Gun, Carr put on his investigative-reporter hat to reconstruct his various sordid lives. He interviewed friends, ex-friends, family members and colleagues, all in the effort to document the man he has been, rather than the myth he’s in the habit of spinning stories about.
ALSO, the use of mercenaries in Iraq is nearly as contentious as the war itself, but private military contractor John Geddes argues that mercenary soldiers can play a role as vital as that of United Nations’ peacekeepers in times of war. Geddes became a private military contractor in Iraq in 2003. His new book, Highway to Hell: Dispatches from a Mercenary in Iraq, recounts his experiences and offers an inside perspective on the use of mercenaries in international conflicts. Geddes is a former warrant officer in Britain’s elite Special Air Service and a veteran of several wars.
PREVIOUSLY: Fear And Loathing In Minneapolis