Showing results by author "Tom Reiss" in All Categories

Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Who was the real Count of Monte Cristo? In this extraordinary biography, Tom Reiss traces the almost unbelievable life of the man who inspired not only Monte Cristo, but all three of the Musketeers: the novelist's own father. Born in St Dominigue in 1762, the son of a French nobleman and a sugar plantation slave, General Alexandre Dumas did not have an auspicious start in life.

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...

Es sollte ein Leben voller Spannungen und unerwarteter Wendungen werden, das den sensiblen jüdischen Jungen Lev Nussimbaum bis ins Berlin der Wilden Zwanziger Jahre führte...

Astonishing. Searingly honest with plenty of drama, it is the true story of a young life that promised much and 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.