Rating: 
Summary: The Benefits of Such a Life: Boredom
Review: Two brothers, professors at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, write a memoir unlike any I have read before. Frederick Barthelme has over ten books to his credit, novels, short story collections, and even one novel called Bob the Gambler, a rather ironic title. Steven, an essayist and fiction writer, has previously published And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story. They are comfortably paid, middle-class academics, who for many years reaped the benefits of such a life: boredom. This would change.The book Double Down is an interesting though sometimes passé portrait of two brothers who take "the evacuation route away from their boredom," to borrow a phrase from a billboard advertising the Big Casino in New Orleans. Intertwined with the story are short glimpses of the Barthelme family, the children growing up in an upper-middle class architect's home where the father was overbearing and pragmatic to a fault. At the bottom of it all, it appears that the boys turned sour, and had a tremendous case of resentment for their father. The parents died in 1995 and 1996, and in the process left the children with a small but respectable inheritance, about $150,000 each. Already dead was their older brother Donald, one of the finest short fiction writers of the 20th century. One problem, besides death and bereavement, by this time, was that Rick and Steven were compulsive, addicted, gamblers, spending pay checks, jacking up credit cards, driving down from Hattiesburg to the Gulf Coast after teaching classes for all night games at the blackjack table. But this alone was no story, really, no matter how eloquent, lucid, or stark the prose these two writers could provide. What made this a story, I think, were the accusations by the Grand Casino, and the district attorney's indictment, for alleged conspiracy to do what the casinos do daily to their patrons: rob the wallet (in this case, the house). By late 1996, the two Barthelme were interrogated and accused of conspiring along with a dealer to defraud the casino. The brothers claimed to have had no connections to casino employees outside the casino itself. Nevertheless, indictments followed. Eventually, the highly publicized arrests and criminal charges were dropped. The book is full of tension, detailing the seedy business of two gamblers' foolish attempts at beating the house, a father figure who haunts the boys like a ghost, a benevolent and beautiful mother, the nature of addiction in American culture, and the New South. This is a stunning book on the subject of family, death, and dying, the lust for excitement, the psychology of gambling, and trouble of addictive behavior. A very well written memoir. -------------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman
Rating:
Summary: Not a how-to book
Review: When some athlete demands that his contract be renegotiated and you hear the phrase, "It's not about the money," that's when you know that it most certainly IS about the money. But for the Barthelmes the trouble they find really isn't abou the money. Even though they lost $250,000 gambling in Mississippi casinos, that isn't the loss that moved them. The money they lost wasn't theirs, really, it was inherited from their recently-deceased parents, and much of the book is a memoir of the life they had with their parents, and of how their lives lost direction after their parents passed away. But I enjoyed the parts revealing their gambling lives best. The brothers were able to live quite normal lives, teaching and writing as well as they ever had while at the same time spending hours at the boats playing games they knew deep down they had no chance to win. Their description of their casino experience is fascinating, often morbidly so. They write of hands that fell their way and slots that yielded big jackpots, but it's difficult to feel any pleasure in it, because you know that the winnings will be returned to the casino in short order. What this book ISN'T is a book on how not to gamble. The authors realize early on that the casinos exist to take your money. They read scores of books on how to beat the odds and how to count cards and find them all pointless. They like the risk-- counting cards is too much like work, it takes all the fun out of playing. And they understand that over time there is no way you can expect to beat a casino in fair play, no way, no matter how sharp or lucky you are. The merciless laws or probabilty will grind you up. But the most telling line in the whole book sums up the whole problem with gambling addicts, that, "...losing never felt like the worst part. Quitting did." At the end of the book the brothers were arrested on ridiculous felony gambling charges, and while the dust jacket states that the charges were later dropped, the book itself ends with the charges still standing, so you don't know what happened to them afterwards or why the charges were dropped, which was disappointing. But the book does show the dark side of big-time gambling (or gaming, gambling's new cute-and-cuddly name) and it provides some sort of counterargument to those who think that gambling can cure a region's economic woes. The games pump some money in, but whose money, and at what social cost is it earned?
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