WINNER OF THE 2013 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. But, hidden behind General Dumas's swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat. The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. TIME magazine called The Black Count "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible." But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

Biographies & Memoirs

Reiss, Tom

Community & Culture

Crown

Here is the remarkable true story of the real Count of Monte Cristo – a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature. Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution, in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East – until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat. The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

Historical

Random House Audio |

The Orientalist is the extraordinary story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world as political extremism swept Europe. Part Quest for Corvo, part Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it unravels the mysterious life of Lev Nussimbaum, a man born on the border of Europe and Persia, just as Revolution began to redraw the map. To read this book is to wander into a fabulous and forgotten civilisation, buried for ever by the forces of Naziism and Bolshevism. Tom Reiss first came across Nussimbaum when he went to the ex-USSR to research Russia's oil reserves, and discovered a novel instead. Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, and a turn-of-the-century monument to cosmopolitanism and the huge wealth generated by Russia's black gold. The novel changed the way Reiss looked at East-West relations, but who was Kurban Said, its supposed author? And why had he and his book faded into obscurity? A chance encounter suggested to Reiss that Said was a pseudonym for Nussimbaum, but finding Lev was not so easy. For five years, Reiss tracked Nussimbaum's protean identity from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The fascinating story he tells is one of self-aggrandisement and willing deception, but also of political and religious tolerance, and the romantic dream of a universal brotherhood.

The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West

Romance

Contemporary

Chatto

A thrilling page-turner of epic proportions, Tom Reiss’s panoramic bestseller tells the true story of a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. Lev Nussimbaum escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and, as “Essad Bey,” became a celebrated author with the enduring novel Ali and Nino as well as an adventurer, a real-life Indiana Jones with a fatal secret. Reiss pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal–and sometimes as heartbreaking–as his subject’s life.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

Arts & Literature

Random House Publishing Group

Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino–a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust–is still in print today. But Lev’s life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity–until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck–also a friend of both Freud’s and Einstein’s–was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini’s official biographer–until the Fascists discovered his “true” identity. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book–discovered in a half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone–helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound. Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker, he pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his subject’s life. Reiss’s quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian castle, to an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles. As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum’s deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds–of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century–of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, The Orientalist is an astonishing book.

History

Random House]

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The Black Count: Glory, revolution, betrayal and the real Count of Monte Cristo

Leaders & Notable People

Crown, Publishers

Dumas, le comte noir (French Edition)

Europe

Flammarion

Die zahlreichen literarischen Verknüpfungen zwischen den Werken Franz Kafkas und Haruki Murakamis, denen sich diese semiotische Abhandlung widmet, haben bisher in der internationalen Forschung kaum Beachtung gefunden. Dabei zeigt sich im Zwischenspiel der phantastischen Erzählungen Kafkas und Murakamis nicht nur deren unauflösliche Verbindung für die Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, sondern auch eine Reihe neuer Erkenntnisse über das Phantastische in der Literatur an sich. Das Buch versteht sich als Diskussionsbeitrag zur Phantastikforschung, als Konsolidierung der Sonderstellung Kafkas im Diskurs des Phantastischen und schließlich als ersten Beitrag zu einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit den Texten Haruki Murakamis im deutschsprachigen Diskurs.

Kafka, Murakami und das suspendierte Dritte: Eine Semiotik des Phantastischen (Münchener Studien zur literarischen Kultur in Deutschland) (German Edition)

Arts & Photography

Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Después de El orientalista, un bestseller mundial, Tom Reiss nos brinda El conde negro, la original biografía de uno de los grandes héroes olvidados de la Historia, a pesar de que su vida nos resulte inesperadamente familiar. Sus proezas se narran en Los tres mosqueteros, y sus victorias y padecimientos inspiraron El conde de Montecristo, dos novelas escritas por su hijo, Alexandre Dumas. El general Alex Dumas merece ocupar un lugar entre los grandes por un motivo muy singular: fue el único de su raza que estuvo al frente de poderosos ejércitos durante una intrépida campaña en la que atravesó Europa hasta llegar a Oriente Medio. Hijo de una esclava negra y de un noble francés de raza blanca, Alex Dumas nació en Saint-Domingue (hoy Haití). Vendido como esclavo, consiguió llegar a París, donde estudió esgrima y se codeó con la flor y nata de la aristocracia. Cuando estalló la Revolución Francesa, ingresó en el ejército como soldado raso, pero después de hazañas legendarias fue el general al mando de un ejército de más de cincuenta mil hombres. Aunque llegó muy alto, Dumas siguió viviendo gracias a su audacia y a su dominio de la espada, que le permitieron hacer frente a difíciles situaciones de las que siempre salía airoso. Con todo, sus férreos principios terminaron convirtiéndolo en una amenaza para Napoleón. Cuando regresaba a Francia tras conquistar Egipto, su barco se hundió, y él, capturado por un misterioso enemigo, fue a parar a un calabozo, donde fue víctima de un lento envenenamiento. Y el destino que lo esperaba tras conseguir escapar de la prisión sería aún más «ponzoñoso». El conde negro es, a la vez, una vibrante historia rebosante de aventuras, un viaje desbordante de detalles por la historia europea de finales del siglo XVIII y una ventana a la primera sociedad multirracial del mundo moderno. Asimismo, es una narración entrañable sobre los duraderos vínculos del amor paternofilial. Basado en documentos, cartas, despachos militares y el diario que el general Dumas escribió en su cautiverio –documentos desconocidos hasta la fecha–, este libro es una obra maestra en el ámbito de la no ficción narrativa.\nBook Description\nDespués de El orientalista, un bestseller mundial, Tom Reiss nos brinda El conde negro, la original biografía de uno de los grandes héroes olvidados de la Historia, a pesar de que su vida nos resulte inesperadamente familiar. Sus proezas se narran en Los tres mosqueteros, y sus victorias y padecimientos inspiraron El conde de Montecristo, dos novelas escritas por su hijo, Alexandre Dumas. El general Alex Dumas merece ocupar un lugar entre los grandes por un motivo muy singular: fue el único de su raza que estuvo al frente de poderosos ejércitos durante una intrépida campaña en la que atravesó Europa hasta llegar a Oriente Medio. Hijo de una esclava negra y de un noble francés de raza blanca, Alex Dumas nació en Saint-Domingue (hoy Haití). Vendido como esclavo, consiguió llegar a París, donde estudió esgrima y se codeó con la flor y nata de la aristocracia. Cuando estalló la Revolución Francesa, ingresó en el ejército como soldado raso, pero después de hazañas legendarias fue el general al mando de un ejército de más de cincuenta mil hombres. Aunque llegó muy alto, Dumas siguió viviendo gracias a su audacia y a su dominio de la espada, que le permitieron hacer frente a difíciles situaciones de las que siempre salía airoso. Con todo, sus férreos principios terminaron convirtiéndolo en una amenaza para Napoleón. Cuando regresaba a Francia tras conquistar Egipto, su barco se hundió, y él, capturado por un misterioso enemigo, fue a parar a un calabozo, donde fue víctima de un lento envenenamiento. Y el destino que lo esperaba tras conseguir escapar de la prisión sería aún más «ponzoñoso». El conde negro es, a la vez, una vibrante historia rebosante de aventuras, un viaje desbordante de detalles por la historia europea de finales del siglo XVIII y una ventana a la primera sociedad mu

El conde negro: Gloria, revolución, traición y el verdadero conde de Montecristo (Spanish Edition)

Editorial Anagrama

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Books by Reiss, Tom

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Reiss, Tom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

The Black Count: Glory, revolution, betrayal and the real Count of Monte Cristo

Dumas, le comte noir (French Edition)

Kafka, Murakami und das suspendierte Dritte: Eine Semiotik des Phantastischen (Münchener Studien zur literarischen Kultur in Deutschland) (German Edition)

El conde negro: Gloria, revolución, traición y el verdadero conde de Montecristo (Spanish Edition)