BOOK NEWS
Author’s Too Self-Indulgent In Crime Boss’ Bio
By Connor Ennis
Associated Press Writer

The problem with Nick Tosches’ new book, “King of the Jews,’’ (Ecco. 318 Pages. $25.95) is that it contains too much Nick Tosches.

Ostensibly a biography of early 20th-century underworld figure Arnold Rothstein, “King of the Jews” too often resembles an unedited blog of Tosches’ thoughts, complaints, rants and experiences.

Rothstein was a colorful figure, or at least inspired colorful tales. The basis for Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls” and Mey-er Wolfsheim in “The Great Gats-by,” Rothstein was reputed to be the mastermind behind the Black Sox scandal and the fixing of the 1919 World Series.

But Rothstein remains a murky figure in this book. Much of what we learn about him comes from medical reports or transcribed testimony from a legal hearing regarding his will — neither of which Tosches feels compelled to directly address.

In the first two-thirds of the book, the figure of Rothstein is submerged beneath long passages about linguistics, Judaic history, the development of New York City and the author’s inability to grasp the fact that by law, he is no longer allowed to smoke where he wants.

In small quantities some of these tangents are interesting, even amusing. His section about the death of his friend, writer Hubert Selby Jr., whom he does not name, is touching and an example of the power of Tosches’ writing when he is able to harness it.

But, taken as a whole, these forays into various topics simply become self- indulgent. It is hard to imagine, for example, how this particular section helps bring the reader closer to the story of Rothstein:

“But to a soul as receptive and a mind as brilliant as (German poet Friedrich) Holderlin’s, the noun Quell, meaning ‘source,’ was rich in evocation, summoning forth not only the Urquell, the primal fountainhead, and the strong Ger-man verb quel-len, ‘to spring from,’ ‘to well up,’ and ‘to gush,’ but also the um-brous ancestral resonance of the Old High Ger-man quellen, meaning ‘to torture’ and ‘to kill,’ from the same Teutonic root that brought the words ‘kill’ and ‘quell’ to the English language, in which a ‘quell,’ from Shake-speare to Keats, was a slaying or a slaughter and also, in the nineteenth century, a beneficent wellspring, as in Mary Clairmonte’s ‘quell of living water out of which he drew fresh strength.’”

Tosches spends much of his time – or, more accurately, much of the time in which he’s writing about Rothstein – disavowing tales about the man that were previously regarded as truth. It is a necessary exercise, but one that Tosches seems to view primarily as a chance for self-aggrandizement.

“I am the truth. Believe only in me,’’ he writes at a certain point.

It would be hard to find a statement that better distills Tosches’ arrogance, a fatal flaw. His complaints that New York is not as it used to be when it “lived and breathed’’ certainly have merit. However, after pages of reading his reasons for why he believes the vibrant, creative and dangerous New York is gone forever, one begins to feel like a child who is listening to his grandfather tell him about how he used to walk two miles to school in the snow.

And his belief that it is impossible to truly understand the machinations of a person’s mind and, therefore, impossible to truly write an accurate

account of that person’s life also has validity.

The question then becomes: Why did he bother to write the book? And the question that will then come to the minds of those who pick it up is: Why am I bothering to read this?

There may not be an adequate answer for either.