Ebook: Double down: reflections on gambling and loss
Author: Barthelme Steve, Barthelme Frederick
- Tags: Compulsive gamblers--Mississippi--Psychology, Compulsive gambling--Mississippi, Compulsive gamblers--Psychology, Compulsive gambling, Compulsive gambling -- Mississippi, Compulsive gamblers -- Mississippi -- Psychology, Compulsive gamblers -- Psychology, Mississippi
- Year: 2001
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- City: San Diego;Mississippi
- Edition: 1st Harvest ed
- Language: English
- epub
"So each night begins. One of us picks up the other and we drive into the Mississippi darkness, headed for a place where everything is different." This first nonfiction book by Frederick Barthelme, author of BOB THE GAMBLER, and his brother and colleague Steven is both a story of family feeling and a testimony to the risky allure of casinos. Within a year and a half, the authors had lost both of their parents, less than a decade after their brother Donald died. Their exacting father had been a prominent modernist architect in Houston; their mother, the architect of this family of seven, which she "invented, shaped, guided, and protected." "We were on our own in a remarkable new way," the Barthelmes write, "and we were not ready." What followed was a several-year escapade during which the two brothers lost close to a quarter million dollars in the gambling boats off the Mississippi coast. They played to enter that addictive land of possibility. Then, in a bizarre twist, they...