In 2008's The Night of the Gun, David Carr wrote about how, as a single dad battling drug addiction, he raised his baby twins in his home state of Minnesota. Final Draft: The Collected Work of David Carr inspires no less admiration for the journalist, who died in 2015 at age 58.
Edited by Carr's widow, Jill Rooney Carr, Final Draft gathers nearly 60 personal and journalistic pieces dating from 1989 to 2015; they're bundled into seven sections reflecting what Carr was up to when he wrote them: freelancing, working for Washington City Paper, columnist for the New York Times, and so on. One constant feature is Carr's signature folksy-wry wordsmithery--e.g., "I have friends in town from a place where the Beltway is found only on a pair of pants."
It's clear from the pieces selected for Final Draft that one of Carr's preoccupations was journalistic ethics, including his own: he cops to having blown it when he interviewed Bill Cosby in 2011 and didn't ask about the sexual assault allegations against him. Another obvious fascination of Carr's was people in the market for second chances; his profile subjects include a disgraced airline pilot, the plagiarist Ruth Shalit, and the formerly drug-abusing actor Robert Downey Jr. If there's a cautionary tale within Final Draft, it's not so much about the dangers of substance abuse as about the danger of giving up on someone--after all, that someone could have been David Carr. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer