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: A Memoir of War, PTSD, and the Dangerous Bets We Make 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.
