The Orientalist

Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812972767
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 491

Book Description
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

Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407053825
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
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.

Orientalism

Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804153868
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

The Orientalists

Author: Kristian Davies
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The Orientalists pursues the mid to late 19th century, when American and European artists traveled and painted throughout the Holy Land and India. The highly cinematic images they created suggest a great influence on modern visual culture.

The Orientalist

Author: Thomas Bacon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gift books
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description

Women as Portrayed in Orientalist Painting

Author: Lynne Thornton
Publisher: www.acr-edition.com
ISBN: 9782867700842
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
Of all the customs and traditions concerning the lives of oriental women, the harem is probably the most familiar and least understood in the West. Over 150 orientalist painters, both prestigious and less known, are brought together in this book as individual monographs.

Führer-Ex

Author: Ingo Hasselbach
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
Once Ingo Hasselbach was a neo-Nazi, preaching racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-government terrorism. Now the 28-year-old founder and leader of the first neo-Nazi party in East Germany takes as his mission the prevention of others following the path of hate. In this eye-opening memoir, Hasselbach vividly exposes the violent movement he helped create--and tells why he left it behind. Photos.

The Orientalist And The Ghost

Author: Susan Barker
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448169933
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
Malaya 1951, a jungle resettlement camp: young colonial adventurer Christopher Milnar falls passionately in love with a Chinese nurse Evangeline - a fierce flame that ends in tragedy when their camp is attacked by Communist guerrillas and Christopher is violently beaten up. London: half a century later the ghosts of that time return to haunt Christopher, triggering vivid memories of colonial misconduct and lost love. Forced to confront his past, Christopher agonises over the fate of his beloved Evangeline and the disappearance of their daughter, Frances. Moving from present day London to the heart of the Malayan jungle in colonial times, THE ORIENTALIST AND THE GHOST is a stunning portrayal of human frailty and lost love.

Enlightenment Orientalism

Author: Srinivas Aravamudan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226024482
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

The Black Count

Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307952959
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY • ONE OF ESQUIRE’S BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME 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.