Nonfiction Readings

R.D. Rosen has written several nonfiction books, including A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West and Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors. He also won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for his first of five mystery novels and has written about sports for many national publications. In Tough Luck: Sid Luckman, Murder, Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL (Atlantic Monthly Press), Rosen tells the hidden story of legendary Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman and his criminal father set in Depression-era New York. As 18-year-old Sid makes headlines in New York City for his high school football exploits, his father, Meyer, was making headlines for the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Sid becomes a star at Columbia and a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback in Chicago while Meyer serves 20-years-to-life in Sing Sing Prison —all of it studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades. Tough Luck traces two simultaneous historical developments through a single immigrant family: the rise of the National Football League, and the demise―triggered by Meyer Luckman’s crime and initial coverup―of the Brooklyn labor rackets and Louis Lepke’s infamous organization Murder, Inc. Steve Wulf, of ESPN, noted how “[a]s the quarterback of the Chicago Bears in the ‘40s, Sid Luckman revolutionized the game […], inspired an entire generation of Jewish-Americans and endeared himself to the biggest names in sports and show business. But as R. D. Rosen reveals in this thoughtful, moving biography, the pressure that […] Luckman faced from would-be tacklers was nothing compared to his need to outrun the shadow of his father’s criminal past.”

Rich Cohen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tough Jews; Monsters; Sweet and Low; When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead (with Jerry Weintraub); The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones; and The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse. He is a co-creator of the HBO series Vinyl and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. He is the author of The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation (Spiegel & Grau). Albert Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. His criminal career reached its peak in 1860, when he was hired, under an alias, as a hand on an oyster sloop. His plan was to rob the ship and flee, disappearing into the teeming streets of lower Manhattan. But the plan went awry—the ship was found listing and unmanned in the foggy straits of Coney Island—and the voyage that was to enrich him instead led to his last desperate flight. Rich Cohen tells the story of this notorious underworld figure, from his humble origins to the wild, globe-crossing, bacchanalian crime spree that forged his ruthlessness and his reputation, to his ultimate incarnation as a demon who terrorized lower Manhattan, at a time when pirates anchored off 14th Street.