The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:
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.

 


From the Hardcover edition.

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

From reader reviews:

George Hartzell:

This The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life are reliable for you who want to become a successful person, why. The key reason why of this The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life can be on the list of great books you must have will be giving you more than just simple studying food but feed a person with information that possibly will shock your prior knowledge. This book is handy, you can bring it everywhere you go and whenever your conditions in e-book and printed versions. Beside that this The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life forcing you to have an enormous of experience like rich vocabulary, giving you trial of critical thinking that we know it useful in your day task. So , let's have it and enjoy reading.

Gladys James:

The book The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life has a lot of information on it. So when you read this book you can get a lot of advantage. The book was published by the very famous author. This articles author makes some research prior to write this book. This kind of book very easy to read you can obtain the point easily after reading this book.

Joan Naylor:

People live in this new moment of lifestyle always try to and must have the extra time or they will get wide range of stress from both daily life and work. So , whenever we ask do people have spare time, we will say absolutely of course. People is human not really a huge robot. Then we inquire again, what kind of activity do you possess when the spare time coming to an individual of course your answer will certainly unlimited right. Then do you try this one, reading textbooks. It can be your alternative within spending your spare time, often the book you have read is actually The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.

Colleen Williams:

Many people spending their time by playing outside with friends, fun activity along with family or just watching TV the entire day. You can have new activity to spend your whole day by looking at a book. Ugh, do you think reading a book can actually hard because you have to take the book everywhere? It fine you can have the e-book, delivering everywhere you want in your Mobile phone. Like The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life which is getting the e-book version. So , why not try out this book? Let's notice.