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The Orientalist : Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life Hardcover - 2005
by Tom Reiss
- Used
- Good
- Hardcover
Description
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Details
- Title The Orientalist : Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
- Author Tom Reiss
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First Edition
- Condition Used - Good
- Pages 433
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Random House Publishing Group, Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A.
- Date 2005
- Illustrated Yes
- Bookseller's Inventory # G1400062659I3N01
- ISBN 9781400062652 / 1400062659
- Weight 1.65 lbs (0.75 kg)
- Dimensions 9.36 x 6.44 x 1.43 in (23.77 x 16.36 x 3.63 cm)
- Library of Congress subjects Authors, German - 20th century, Said, Kurban
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 2004050928
- Dewey Decimal Code B
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Summary
An extraordinary and hugely topical story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world.On the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world.Tom Reiss first came across Nussimbaum when he went to the ex-USSR to research Russia's oil reserves, 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 Kurban Said, its supposed author? And why did he and his book fade into obscurity?For five years, Reiss tracked Said's protean identity 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.
First line
LEV NUSSIMBAUM WAS BORN IN OCTOBER 1905, the moment when the tolerant, haute capitaliste culture of Baku began to fall apart.