“With the possible exception of Norman Mailer when he’s on a roll, Nick Tosches might be the most distinguishable nonfiction prose writer in America today,” writes Allen Barra in an essay at Salon. Tosches’ work, according to Barra, is “intensely personal and relentlessly idiosyncratic,” but his new book, King of The Jews, makes “you feel like an outsider in a strange land.” The book tells the story of Arnold Rothstein, a man famous for fixing the 1919 World Series, and for an appearance as a character in The Great Gatsby. Tosches undertook the project of writing a new book on Rothstein to suggest a new image of his character, which Tosches believed had been distorted by previous accounts. In an interesting discussion of how fact and fiction can work in such a biography, Tosches notes that “It is not the artful novelist who has blurred the divide between fiction and fact: it is the professor of learning, the peddler of secondhand misknowing … It is better to keep away from words, ‘facts,’ ‘knowledge.’ They are almost always the carriers of disease.”