Sean Carberry is an award-winning journalist and former NPR correspondent who has reported from Sudan, Colombia, Iraq, Congo, Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan. His two memoirs chronicle the journey into and out of conflict zones, and the war waiting for him at home.
NEW RELEASE
Doubling Down: A Memoir of War, PTSD, and the Dangerous Bets We Make
Sean Carberry spent years reporting from war zones. Back home, high-stakes gambling on the casino floor was the closest thing to the rush he was missing.
Doubling Down: A Memoir of War, PTSD, and the Dangerous Bets We Make
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 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. It’s a dispatch from a world most casino-goers never see, a reckoning with the seductions of danger, and the demons of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and couldn’t stop anyway.
Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home
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. In Passport Stamps, Carberry’s encounters a lot of dust, weaponry, ragged infrastructure, 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.
Sean Carberry is a Peabody and Lowell Thomas award-winning journalist, writer, and editor. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR’s last Kabul-based correspondent in 2012 through 2014. After that, he spent several years working for the Defense Department Office of Inspector General, writing and editing oversight reports on counterterrorism operations, before returning to journalism. In a previous life, he was a recording engineer, producer, and occasional guitarist working with artists including Combustible Edison, Four Piece Suit, The Mercy Brothers, The Radio Kings, and Susan Tedeschi. He has a B.A. from Lehigh University and an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.
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