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Author Reiss, Tom.

Title The Orientalist : solving the mystery of a strange and a dangerous life / Tom Reiss.

Publication Info. New York : Random House, [2005]
©2005

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Berlin-Peck Memorial Library - Biographies  92 BIOGRAPHY SAID    Check Shelf
 Cromwell-Belden Public Library - Adult Department  B SAID    In Transit
 Farmington, Main Library - Adult Department  B SAID, KURBAN    Check Shelf
 Mansfield, Main Library - Adult Nonfiction  813.912 REISS    Check Shelf
 Middletown, Russell Library - Adult Biography  B-SAID REI    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  92 SAID, KUR    Check Shelf
 Simsbury Public Library - Biographies  BIOG SAID, KURBAN    Check Shelf
 South Windsor Public Library - Biographies  B SAID    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  833 REISS    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description xxvii, 433 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [385]-411) and index.
Contents Revolution -- Wild Jews -- The way east -- Escape -- Constantinople, 1921 -- Minarets and silk stockings -- The German revolution -- The Berlin wall -- A hundred kinds of hunger -- Weimar media star -- Jewish Orientalism -- Backing into the inferno -- A tough morsel for the melting pot -- Mussolini and Mrs. Kurban said -- Positano.
Summary This book 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 in 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. But his 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 was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. He was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer--until the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest, he wrote his last book, helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound. As he tracks down the pieces of Lev'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.
Subject Said, Kurban, 1905-1942.
Authors, German -- 20th century -- Biography.
ISBN 1400062659 alkaline paper
9781400062652 alkaline paper
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