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In the casinos, where the lively details and the passion for gambling ignite the brothers, "Double Down" is at its best. The Barthelmes write about their family with style and grace, but they're less certain about those relationships than they are about gambling, and these family sections read as if they were still searching for a conclusion.

Double Down By Frederick and Steven Barthelme Buy this book at B&N.com 24/7 By Andrés Martinez Buy this book at B&N.com In Nevada By David Thomson Buy this book at B&N.com Also Today Games people play "Double Down" authors Frederick and Steven Barthelme talk about family, gambling and their run-in with the legal system. By Jim Hanas

At times, "Double Down" reads like a confessional, a 200-page public apology with overtones of a Gambler's Anonymous speech. "We were adult children, overage children, who lost our parents and reacted with a clear disregard for the self, not to mention the other," they write. "Maybe it was about grief and relief and release, and maybe a newly visible aggression at having been held hostage for a lifetime." This flaw, though, is redeemed by the authors' honesty about their problem. They know they're addicted to gambling, and they explain exactly how they rationalized that addiction -- it didn't hurt other people or even themselves, only their bankrolls.

More problematic is the implication that the Barthelmes are of a different species than their fellow gamblers. They reveled in a pastime that took them away from the comfort zone of academic life, yet they make it clear that they were only slumming with the riff-raff in the riverboats. Their fascination with the tawdry casinos and their players is explained with a curious detachment: "We loved them, at a respectable distance, the same distance at which one loves characters in books or on television shows." It's an oddly superior stance, especially since Frederick Barthelme's last novel, "Bob the Gambler," lovingly portrayed a poor, working-class family with an elegant realism.

One of the Barthelmes' most interesting observations is that winning or losing really doesn't matter to a gambler. He simply has to keep playing, for life happens only when there are stakes on the table. Everything else is slow-motion, incidental. Andrés Martinez comes to a similar understanding in "24/7." His month-long trip begins at the bank, with Martinez cashing that $50,000 check from his publisher. He flies to Vegas and sets himself up in the first of 10 mega-hotels, the Egyptian-themed Luxor, which is a giant pyramid with a life-sized model Sphinx out front. For the rest of the trip, he flits between resorts, gambling mostly at night, spending his days interviewing anyone he can find.

Martinez is a good newspaper writer. He was born and raised in Mexico, studied history at Yale, Russian history at Stanford and law at Columbia. After a brief stint as a lawyer he flipped careers to journalism and did time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Wall Street Journal. To Martinez's credit, he doesn’t pretend to be much more than a craftsman journalist. He would rather report than ruminate. He tells jokes. He gets the story.

Martinez rolls into town with a decent bag of books, having already read several of the standard critical texts and historical overviews of Las Vegas. He reads Dostoevsky's "The Gambler" -- a work that the Barthelmes and Thomson also cite -- by the pool. (It's either a hell of a coincidence or a worldly warning that, just like the protagonist in Dostoevsky's novella, the Barthelmes and Martinez all gambled with money that was ostensibly not theirs.)

Martinez rehashes bits of the local paper and has the self-consciousness to explain to the reader exactly what he's doing. He talks to everyone: cab drivers, career dealers, career gamblers, a tennis pro, a water conservationist, a preacher who moonlights as a towel man in a strip joint. Everyone except unavailable hotelier Steve Wynn, the man behind the Mirage and the expensive new Bellagio. Wynn, who wouldn’t return several phone calls, is to a bemused Martinez the personification of the new Vegas, the Disney-style entertainment capital. As if to get in the spirit of the family theme of the new Vegas, Martinez entertains his mother for a few days, and then his wife, who loves the spas, good restaurants staffed by world-class chefs and hotel rooms larger than the couple's New York apartment.

Like a book-length magazine story, the charms of "24/7" are chiefly its minor epiphanies. "To linger over a loss is to stop being a gambler," writes Martinez in a chapter where he loses $20,000 in one session. Another: "Las Vegas was never a defined place that sold its soul to entertain outsiders, like a Santa Fe or a San Francisco. Las Vegas was invented to cater to visitors' whims, and to change with them, making it the nation's ultimate mirror." One more: "Las Vegas will have consumed its history the day that the first gangster-themed hotel opens on the strip."

Martinez is an outsider, a tourist, and he really never lets you forget that he went to Vegas for one month in search of a story. While he only limns the story of how the mob built Vegas, in "In Nevada" David Thomson tells the story of gangster Bugsy Siegel, who lost $6 million on the Flamingo, then zooms in for the nine gun shots that killed him, one of which dislodged an eyeball that rolled across the floor from his corpse. There is a strange proprietary sense about "In Nevada." Thomson's smart enough to know that one of the central myths of the West is that things were always better in the good old days, yet he nearly fetishizes ghost towns, and just about any use of the desert -- whether by the Air Force, by high-speed car racers, or by the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert -- rankles him. In Thomson's view, you're supposed to be dwarfed and awed by the landscape, its light and its mysteries.

Thomson is a fine portraitist, and his chapters are fact-filled and compellingly suggestive, particularly one on Frank Sinatra as a son of Nevada. A section that cuts between a tour of the Nevada Test Site and the early history of Vegas, equating the risk of gaming with the international gamble of the Cold War, also makes you instinctively want to trust him. So it's odd that he can see that contradictions are at the center of Las Vegas and confidence games, but he doesn't get that the great unresolved conflict of the West is how to use it. Land in the East was taken for granted by early Americans. The West was won, bought and stolen, and America has never really reconciled itself with that. Silver mines and testing grounds and the Hoover Dam and even Las Vegas are intrusive as hell, but they’re also as much a part of the West now as big skies and open prairies.
salon.com | Dec. 1, 1999

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