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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 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 andsurreal, 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.
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.
"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." It is also a
heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father
and son.
"Essad Bey, the sickly son of an oil millionaire from Baku,
Azerbaijan, receives permission from his father to spend the summer
with his "milk brother" (that is, with whom he was nursed by the
same Caucasian nanny) Ali Khan, passing the holiday in his home
village in the wild Caucasus. So the two set out, under the custody
of a wise attendant, into an archaic world in which chivalry
counted more than buying power and poets were more highly regarded
than princes - into a country in which, as a kind of curiosity shop
of world history, all that is outlived and forgotten was loyally
preserved." This is Essad Bey's second book, which was first
published in English in 1931. In it the author draws upon his
Oriental imaginative powers, conjuring a vast panorama of the
Caucasus, its people and customs. The result is a fresh and densely
atmospheric work, even if not always laying claim to scientific
accuracy. Often adding a touch of imagination, the author succeeds
in bringing the heart and soul of this archaic world to life, which
he had himself experienced and learned to love as a child.
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
The Sopranos hat neue kunstlerische Massstabe gesetzt. Das uber die
Episoden fortlaufende Geschehen verlasst die Vertrautheit
automatisierter Schemata, die in jeder Folge aktualisiert werden
und den meisten TV-Serien bis heute zugrunde liegen. Bisherige, im
Wesentlichen englischsprachige Untersuchungen verfolgen
mehrheitlich einen interpretativen Ansatz, wahrend dieses Buch sich
den Verfahren der Serie widmet. Es ist der erste deutschsprachige
Sammelband zur Poetik der Sopranos.
Die zahlreichen literarischen Verknupfungen 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 Erzahlungen Kafkas und Murakamis nicht nur deren
unaufloesliche Verbindung fur die Literatur des 20. und 21.
Jahrhunderts, sondern auch eine Reihe neuer Erkenntnisse uber 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 Beschaftigung mit den Texten Haruki
Murakamis im deutschsprachigen Diskurs.
An Autobiography like Something Out of the Arabian Nights In this
lively and witty autobiography, Essad Bey, a.k.a. Lev Nussimbaum,
tells us the story of his childhood in Baku, the capital of
Azerbaijan, and of his flight from the Russian Revolution in 1917,
which brought him first straight through the Caucasus, then to
Istanbul - where this book concludes - and finally to Berlin. When
Essad Bey speaks of the people of the Caucasus and their customs so
strange to us, a sort of anthropological cabinet of curiosities
unfolds before our eyes, and we cannot help but be astonished. All
the while, through his affectionate and sometimes openly ironic
words, even the excesses of the Revolution sound like children's
pranks and his hair-raising escape like an adventure novel. "Blood
and Oil in the Orient" is an informative and entertaining book; in
the 1930s, it was a bestseller in the U.S. and Germany.
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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