- Hardcover: 318 pages
- Publisher: Ecco (May 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0066211182
- ISBN-13: 978-0066211183
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,122,799 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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ONCE UPON A TIME, when New York City lived and breathed, there was a man marked for death, like us all. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
ONCE UPON A TIME, when New York City lived and breathed, there was a man marked for death, like us all. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
To describe this book as a biography is to risk prosecution under the trade descriptions act.The Arnold Rothstein story is as misnomer a description as ever a publishers blurb has ever been permitted.I kid you not,but the author of this horrendous pile of tosh actually has more to say about the history of religion and the current state of us politics than he has about Arnold Rothstein,whose life appears more as a footnote to the authors nonsensical ramblings on all manner of unrelated subjects.Ive purchased hundreds of books from amazon over the years and without doubt this is by far the worst.Its so bad that I have actually written this review my first in over 7 years of amazon membership.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
13 reviews
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
GOOD TOSCHES BUT NOT GREAT TOSCHES !
9 May 2005
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I am a fan fanatic when it comes to the work of Nick Tosches , and having read "In the Hand of Dante ', and then "Where Dead Voices Gather" , I am convinced Tosches is a genius. I am still in the process of buying up all that he has written. Having lit the candles and incense at the Tosches altar , I must admit that after reading "King of the Jews" in two days I was disappointed. This time he was not able to spin the magic as he did in "Trinities" and "Cut Numbers" , which I consider his masterpieces to date. I will still buy everything he writes and hope to meet him for dinner at some future date before we get much older.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Tosches: King of everything but Rothstein, but okay
6 Aug 2005
Format:Hardcover
The dark specter of the private mind has often pervaded Nick Tosches' writing, as in his critically acclaimed biographies on Dean Martin (Dino) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Hellfire). Recently, however, the focal psyche examined by the author has been his own, as he scrutinizes and disparages at the behest of his various moods. His novel In the Hand of Dante confronts the writing racket. The Last Opium Den grieves the passing of old ways.
With King of the Jews, Tosches, a bit honked off that he can no longer light up in his favorite bars, has finally detonated a literary bomb over the whole of Western civilization, from the "confectionery lies called history" to contemporary culture's "mall of mortuary mediocrity." The text alleges to be a biography on Arnold Rothstein, yet history has buried the legendary gambler in a swathe of secrecy that even Tosches' exhaustive research fails to breach. Instead the author uses Rothstein as a window through which we can peer irreverently upon the hollow husk of history, "the snake-oil pitchman's forgery of yore" that becomes "inspirational gospel." While he shatters one Rothstein myth after another, he manages to dispense plenty of other snippets upon the reader with savage eloquence, theorizing, for instance, that early Hebraism was polytheistic, and comparing former Mayor Giuliani to the Nazis.
What saves this text from being a self-indulgent fit is that most of the author's arguments are compelling and persuasive, and apparently connected. At least for Tosches, who also undertakes a textually self-aware examination that begs such questions as "why am I writing this, and why are you reading it?" This is a thriving mausoleum of a biography; essentially dead as regards Rothstein's story, yet intricate and forebodingly poetic in its contemplation of everything else.
With King of the Jews, Tosches, a bit honked off that he can no longer light up in his favorite bars, has finally detonated a literary bomb over the whole of Western civilization, from the "confectionery lies called history" to contemporary culture's "mall of mortuary mediocrity." The text alleges to be a biography on Arnold Rothstein, yet history has buried the legendary gambler in a swathe of secrecy that even Tosches' exhaustive research fails to breach. Instead the author uses Rothstein as a window through which we can peer irreverently upon the hollow husk of history, "the snake-oil pitchman's forgery of yore" that becomes "inspirational gospel." While he shatters one Rothstein myth after another, he manages to dispense plenty of other snippets upon the reader with savage eloquence, theorizing, for instance, that early Hebraism was polytheistic, and comparing former Mayor Giuliani to the Nazis.
What saves this text from being a self-indulgent fit is that most of the author's arguments are compelling and persuasive, and apparently connected. At least for Tosches, who also undertakes a textually self-aware examination that begs such questions as "why am I writing this, and why are you reading it?" This is a thriving mausoleum of a biography; essentially dead as regards Rothstein's story, yet intricate and forebodingly poetic in its contemplation of everything else.
13 of 17 people found the following review helpful
It's not a Biography; its the dissection of an idea
12 Aug 2005
Format:Hardcover
I do not usually write book reviews because digesting books is such a personal experience, but I was surprised that none of the reviewers of Tosches's latest book got it, or him, at all. Tosches is definitely an idiosyncratic, splenetic writer who is not for everyone, but presumably that is exactly what his readers most value. The point of Tosches's book isn't to create a "real" biography of Rothstein, but to question the very nature of what is "real," what is "history," and what are the actual underpinnings of our beliefs. By refusing to artificially connect-the-dots of what little is "known" about Rothstein (or anyone/anything else), Tosches underscores the point that what most of us take as "history" is nothing but imaginative narrative that reveals more about the narrator than the putative subject matter. This is much the same point as Simon Schama made in Dead Certainties. Tosches's comments on the old testament, the devolution from gods to God, and the concoction of the christ figure are not random digressions, but further examples of the same point (the substantive questionability of received truth) writ large. Check out Umberto Eco's Serendipities for another exposition of how powerful myths (like christ or rothstein) sometimes start from nothing and are based on nothing. "In Russia, the past is unpredictable." "History" is an ever-growing cotton-candy meta-narrative spun from other people's equally baseless subjective narratives. Tosches book is, however, much more interesting that those other para-academic books. Dontcha get it?
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