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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 H...
The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world. Tom Reiss first came across the man who called himself 'Kurban Said' when he went to the ex-USSR to research the oil business on the Caspian Sea, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was its supposed author? And why was he so forgotten that no one could agree on the simplest facts about him? For five years, Reiss tracked Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said, 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 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.
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2013 ‘Completely absorbing’ Amanda Foreman 'Enthralling’ Guardian ‘The Three Musketeers! The Count of Monte Cristo! The stories of course are fiction. But here a prize-winning author shows us that the inspiration for the swashbuckling stories was, in fact, Dumas’s own father, Alex - the son of a marquis and a black slave... He achieved a giddy ascent from private in the Dragoons to the rank of general; an outsider who had grown up among slaves, he was all for Liberty and Equality. Alex Dumas was the stuff of legend’ Daily Mail So how did such this extraordinary man get erased by history? Why are there no statues of ‘Monsieur Humanity’ as his troops called him? The Black Count uncovers what happened and the role Napoleon played in Dumas’s downfall. By walking the same ground as Dumas - from Haiti to the Pyramids, Paris to the prison cell at Taranto – Reiss, like the novelist before him, triumphantly resurrects this forgotten hero. ‘Entrances from first to last. Dumas the novelist would be proud’ Independent ‘Brilliant’ Glasgow Herald
Her memoirs cover the pre WWII period of the 1930's in her birth country, Bulgaria and her growing up in the German and Russian cultures of her parents and that of Bulgaria. the uprooting of her family because of WWII and subsequent events tells of the increasing horrors and dislocations not only of her family but that of countless others. "The author successfully captures the sharp contrast between her childhood bliss before the war and the horrors of life in German-occupied Europe... an insightful firsthand account of European life in the 1930's and 40's, filled with lessons applicable to the present day." - Kirkus Review
Astonishing. Searingly honest with plenty of drama it is the true story of a young life led that promised much, delivered more that could ever have been envisaged until the bottom fell out of the author's world. From the realms of high finance and a chance encounter with the President to the comedic pathos of the participation in a football tournament, as an inpatient of a psychiatric facility. After a lengthy period flat out on the canvas of life, our pugilist in all but name, gets back into the ring and makes another attempt, successful again, to prove you can't keep a good man down. If only that were the end of the story. But there's a sting in the tail that brings readers up short. The lesson: it really is a good idea to make the most of every day granted to you. Tom Reiss professes to know less and less about life as he poignantly, and with good humour, reflects upon his own. Reiss's mastery of storytelling through his melodic prose gently guides the reader through the most compelling of lives. Quintessentially, this is a beautiful memoir by a truly remarkable man. Read it. You'll be surprised by what you may learn.
This volume decodes the European representations of the Indian body, emotions, and mind in diverse representational discourses. Efforts have been made to counter the mind-centered approaches to body and emotions, reassessing the body's role in intellectual insight and insisting on the centrality of the body in the reproduction and transformation of cultural experiences. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with Indian and cross-cultural studies. (Series: Studien zur Orientalischen Kirchengeschichte / Studies on the Oriental Church History - Vol. 49)
Essays showcasing the novel Ali and Nino as particularly topical for today's readers both in and out of the classroom, and providing a number of diverse approaches to it.
Originally published in hardcover in 2012 by Crown Publishers.