Doubling Down: A Memoir of War, PTSD, and the Dangerous Bets We Make
What does a war correspondent do when the assignment ends? In Sean Carberry’s case, he came home from Afghanistan wired for danger and found civilian life in D.C. unbearably small. So, he sought refuge from the alienation and PTSD in a casino. Doubling Down traces Carberry’s unlikely transformation from NPR Kabul correspondent to Maryland Live Chairman—the casino’s highest tier—and the years of jackpots, decadence, and creeping ruin that followed. Droll, unsettling, and bracingly honest, it’s a dispatch from a world even most casino-goers never see, and a reckoning with the seductions of danger, the grief of a lost identity, and the demons of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and couldn’t stop anyway. It’s the epilogue his memoir, Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home, only hinted at.
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What people are saying about Doubling Down
With searing honesty—and the pathos and wry humor that can only come with real candor—Sean Carberry’s Doubling Down brings readers into the adrenaline-pumping highs of casino jackpots and the dark lows on the other side. Carberry spent years as an internationajournalist covering lives torn asunder by conflict. He then found himself grappling with the inner upheavals and uncertainties left by the career he embraced. Doubling Down is riveting and essential reading.
—Brian Murphy, longtime Associated Press foreign correspondent, Washington Post writer and editor, and author
Doubling Down is part memoir, part thriller, and part horror story. But mostly it is an inspiring call to action from a self-described adrenaline junkie who found the easiest way to deal with his post-war correspondent PTSD was through gambling. Sean Carberry eloquently and honestly describes how the casino industry—with its “gifts” of special status, car service, and fancy meals—was built to prey on people like him. Amazingly, he survives his descent to emerge with a call we would do well to heed: to better care and nurture the wounds our “tribes” are suffering.
—Juliette Kayyem, professor, Harvard Kennedy School and former assistant secretary at DHS
Doubling Down is the painfully gripping story of a war correspondent struggling to find meaning and human connection away from the battlefield. With a journalist’s eye for detail, Carberry chronicles the highs, lows and loneliness of a gambling addiction that threatens to blow up his life.
—Jason Beaubien, former NPR correspondent