The Daddy Shift by Jeremy A Smith

The Daddy Shift by Jeremy A Smith

So begins Nick Tosches's sprawling biography of Arnold Rothstein, which, in fact, is so much more: not 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.

Jason Marsh is editor-in-chief of Greater Good magazine and coeditor, with Jeremy Adam Smith and Dacher Keltner, of The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. Smith is also the author of The Daddy Shift and the editor of Sharable.net. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton holds a PhD from Columbia University and is associate professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley.