Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything - Softcover

'rip-roaring life of the model for Damon Runyon's Sky Masterton' --Sunday Times' Culture `Must Reads' 'Kevin Cook tells his life story as a sporting biography, offering card-by-card and stroke-by-stroke accounts of his greatest heists.' --Daily Express'Thompson's life is a blazing, wild whirlwind that barely slows down even when he ends up in a care home, waving $20 bills at his nurses asking them to undress. It's only February. A more colourful, exciting biography might emerge this year, but I wouldn't put money on it.' --The Times'A morality tale of sorts, perhaps, but none the worse for that and the story is told here with just the right pace and tone. Cook is good on the characters - Minnesota Fats, Capone, Rothstein, Hogan, Trvino - who washed through Thompson's life. He is good, too, on the speakeasies, hotel rooms, county jails, desert fairways and river-boats that formed its inevitable background.' --The Spectator'Another amazing life, this time that of Titanic Thompson, in a brilliant biography delivered in clipped, funny prose. A remarkable story, well told.' --Big Issue Titanic Thompson is a rollicking biography of one of the most charismatic characters in twentieth-century America. Like Howard Hughes or Bonnie and Clyde, Alvin Titanic Thompson was one of the great figures of this freewheeling era; the difference between them: hardly anyone knows Titanics name today. Travelling only with his golf clubs, a .45 revolver, and a suitcase full of cash, this is the legendary story of a man who was married five times to five different girls, the oldest just eighteen on her wedding day; of a man who murdered five men, though hed say theyd all agree they had it coming to them; and of a man who won and lost millions when a pro golfer would earn $10, 000 a year, he was playing single holes for $20, 000.