Doubling Down

Description

Doubling Down: A Memoir of War, PTSD, and the Dangerous Bets We Make
by Sean D. Carberry

Doubling Down picks up where Passport Stamps left off: in the years after the war zones, when the danger followed Sean Carberry home in stranger forms.

About Passport Stamps: A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a former NPR journalist who—driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his “tribe”—seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction.

Praise for Sean Carberry’s Passport Stamps

“I wasn’t who I was because I was a journalist, I was a journalist because of who I am.” We need such journalists. Sean Carberry has written a brave book for which there are no passport stamps—the soul highs and lows of intoxicating faith leaping around dangerous combat zones on a years-long adrenalin rush. This is a clarion call for better mental health treatment after a confusing exodus from that world, where writing knits together that which is frayed and keeps indelible experiences on the shelves of story, always.—Jacki Lyden, author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba and former NPR host and correspondent

 Passport Stamps brings to mind Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.” Carberry describes the evanescence of sunshine and darkness followed by the inevitable being “on the way” of a journalist. Carberry’s world is a tattered web of people and places: Serbia, Russia, Egypt, Columbia, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan—our simultaneously horrifying yet alluring broken globe. Passport Stamps records Carberry’s memories—accounts which make the reader ache for his forgotten life, real or imagined. It is a sharp, raking marvelous travel book, an autobiography rich with detail and ponderings about life.—Sam Pickering, author of The Gate in the Garden Wall, and “The Truth”

A lot of journalists come back from covering war and disaster and write the book about what they saw. Sean Carberry tells a different story—about what goes on inside of such a reporter’s mind out there. Hopes, dreams, fears, embarrassment, hard lessons. It’s all there, and it’s quite a yarn.—John Donvan, former ABC News correspondent, filmmaker, and author of In a Different Key: The Story of Autism

Sean Carberry is an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor. In more than 15 years as a radio and print correspondent, he reported from dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and served as NPR’s last Kabul-based correspondent from 2012 to 2014. He is the author of the memoir Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home (Madville Publishing, 2023). He has a B.A. from Lehigh University and an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School—credentials that did not, it turns out, prevent him from feeding great sums of money into video poker machines. He lives in Washington, D.C., with Squeak, the cat he rescued from the streets of Kabul, who has since been rescuing him.