Book summary

Novelists Frederick and Stephen Barthelme write candidly about their extremely destructive gambling addiction--which resulted in losses at Mississippi casinos of a quarter of a million dollars--and about the accusation made against them of cheating at the tables, a charge of which they were ultimately acquitted. A New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000.

Media reviews

"[A]s bizarre and costly as the Barthelme's legal ordeal certainly was (past tense: All charges were dismissed...), this is no mere cautionary tale. It's a brutally candid, unflattering self-portrait of two successful middle-aged men...who managed, somehow, to sail through their adulthood behaving like 'overage children.'...DOUBLE DOWN is...an unsentimental, even edgy meditation on the loss of one's parents and the often crazy-making trauma of being orphaned in midlife."