Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss by Frederick Barthelme
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Double Down” is a book written by two literature professor brothers who become addicted to casino gambling in Mississippi. The book describes their family backgrounds, outlook on the world, and then goes on to describe their casino gambling experience. This book mostly gets on my nerves because I feel if I ever met the authors, I would want to tell them how spoiled and selfish they are. I felt frustrated reading about their gambling experience because they had clearly lost control. Their gambling compulsions seemed like a symptom of a comprehensive naiveté of the world around them. It reminds me of many of my friends with social science and humanities PHDs who seem completely clueless about the world around them outside of their sheltered academic lives.
Maybe it was the author’s goal to show how seemingly well educated professors could fall into the depths of irrationality by a gambling addiction? I wonder whether their psychology would have otherwise manifested itself into some other degenerative behaviour if not for the money brought on by a small inheritance. I imagine some kind of twisted sexual deviance would have appeared at some point in their lives. Maybe it already has…
