Double Down
Reflections on Gambling and Loss
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“An exquisitely crafted memoir” by two brothers who lost their parents, lost their inheritance—and almost lost their freedom (The Wall Street Journal).
Frederick Barthelme and his brother Steven were both accomplished, respected writers with stable adult lives when they lost both of their parents in rapid succession. They had already lost their other brother, just a few years earlier. Suddenly they were on their own, emotionally unmoored—and unprepared for what would happen next.
Their late father had been a prominent architect, and the brothers were left with a healthy inheritance. Over the following several years, they would lose close to a quarter million dollars in the gambling boats off the Mississippi coast. Then, in a bizarre twist, they were charged with violating state gambling laws, fingerprinted, and thrown into the surreal world of felony prosecution.
For two years these widely publicized charges hung over their heads, shadowing their every step. Double Down is the wry, often heartbreaking story of how Frederick and Steven Barthelme got into this predicament. It is also a reflection on the allure of casinos and the pull and power of illusions that can destroy our lives if we aren’t careful.
“One of the best firsthand accounts ever written about organized gambling. Like Goodman Brown, taking a walk with a hooded stranger into the darkness of the New England woods, the Barthelme brothers suddenly find themselves inside the maw of the monster. The compulsion to control, to intuit the future, to be painted by magic, could not be better or more accurately described.” —James Lee Burke
“Beautifully evoking the gamblers’ addiction, their mesmerizing account is best read as a novel Camus might have imagined, with the writer/protagonists as their own lost characters. A work of high art; enthusiastically recommended.” —Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the legal system, whoever tells the best story wins. But when two "workaday English teachers"--who happen to be the writers Frederick Barthelme (Bob the Gambler) and Steven Barthelme (And He Tells the Horse the Whole Story)--gamble away their $250,000 inheritance in a few years and are indicted for conspiracy to defraud the casino where they were regulars, the tale they have to tell is far more richly complicated--and haunting--than any their lawyer could present. Their narrative seductively juxtaposes the stark loss of their parents, their family's "psychological arithmetic" and the "miraculous multiplication" of winning at the blackjack tables, moving fluently between an account of the brothers' fall into addiction and their memories of a family life that was like "a lovely old-fashioned movie with snappy dialogue and surprising developments, high drama and low comedy, heroes and villains, wit and beauty and regret." By turns dazzlingly canny and achingly abject, the Barthelmes, who write in a single voice, lure the reader into the intimacy of their self-deception. Intoxicated by their brinksmanship and their clever comebacks, readers will hope against hope they'll fight their way back from staggering losses. In retrospect, the brothers' gaming philosophy--"We would have been willing to win, but we were content to lose"--was sustaining in the casino's mirror world where "money isn't money," although, as the authors wryly observe, it crumbled when they were awaiting a legal verdict. FYI: Filed a few weeks after the publication of Bob the Gambler in 1997, the charges against the brothers were dismissed by the Mississippi State Circuit Court in August 1999.