King of the Jews Author:Nick Tosches "Once upon a time, when new York City lived and breathed, there was a man marked for death, like us all. His name was Arnold Rothstein, and he himself was the only god he worshipped. And he was a great and sinful man." — So begins Nick Tosches's sprawling biography of Arnold Rothstein, which, in fact, is so much more: no... more »t only an elegy to old New York but an idiosyncratic history of the world as told in Nick Tosches's inimitable style.
Known by many names -- A. R., Mr. Big, The Fixer, The Big Bankroll, The Man Uptown, and The Brain -- Rothstein seemed more myth than man. He was gambling, and he was money. The inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, he was rumored to be the mastermind of the Black Sox scandal, the fixing of the 1919 World Series. He was Mr. Broadway and had his own booth at Lindy's Restaurant in Manhattan, where he held court.
Now, in King of the Jews, Nick Tosches, "one of the greatest living American writers" (Dallas Observer), examines Rothstein's extraordinary legacy by placing him at the center of nothing less than the history of the entire Western world.« less