Tom Reiss has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 15 ratings. The most-rated is The Black Count.
The Black Count
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, Biography/Autobiography, 2013 By the author of the internationally best-selling biography The Orientalist, The Black Count brings to life one of history’s great forgotten heroes: a man almost unknown today yet with a personal story that is strikingly familiar. His swashbuckling exploits appear in The Three Musketeers, and his triumphs and ultimate tragic fate inspired The Count of Monte Cristo. His name is Alex Dumas. Father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, Alex has become, through his son's books, the model for a captivating modern protagonist: The wronged man in search of justice. Born to a Black slave mother and a fugitive White French nobleman in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but then made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. He was only 32 when he was given command of 53,000 men, the reward for series of triumphs that many regarded as impossible, and then topped his previous feats by leading a raid up a frozen cliff face that secured the Alps for France. It was after his subsequent heroic service as Napoleon’s cavalry commander that Dumas was captured and cast into a dungeon - and a harrowing ordeal commenced that inspired one of the world’s classic works of fiction. 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. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. Drawing on hitherto unknown documents, letters, battlefield reports and Dumas' handwritten prison diary, The Black Count is a groundbreaking masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
©2012 Tom Reiss (P)2012 Random House Audio
The Orientalist
Summary
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 10 countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his subject's life. Reiss' 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 depiction of the 20th 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.
©2005 Tom Reiss (P)2017 Random House Audio
Orientalisten
Summary
Historien om Lev Nussimbaum er så fantastisk, at man kunne tro, det var en roman. Men indholdet er fuldstaendig autentisk. Man fristes naesten til at kalde bogen for magisk realistisk non fiction. Lev Nussimbaum levede og døde som et udpraeget mysterium - et omvandrende menneskeligt paradoks med et vaeld af fascinerende og flamboyante personaer. Nu opruller den pulitzer-vindende forfatter Tom Reiss hele historien om jøden, der iscenesatte sig selv som litteraer personlighed og muslimsk prins midt i Nazityskland. Lev Nussimbaum blev født på et tog i Kiev i 1890, men voksede op i det olierige Baku i Kaukasus. Efter flugten fra Baku i kølvandet på den russiske revolution, hvor Bolsjevikkerne slog hårdt ned på landets oliemagnater, skabte den unge, usaedvanlige mand sig et forfatternavn i 20'ernes og 30'ernes Berlin. Som Essad Bey specialiserede han sig i at skrive om den mystiske og fascinerende orient - altid farverigt og malende og med et frit forhold til sandheden. Hvad enten han iscenesatte sig som muslimsk prins, eksiljøde, Essad Bey eller Kurban Said (forfatter til den af eftertiden lovpriste kaerlighedshistorie Ali og Nino) var den østlige mystik, orienten og dens magnetiske tiltraekningskraft på europaeerne, hovedingrediensen i hans vaerker og i hans flamboyante personaer.Orientalisten er en enestående historie om en fascinerende løgner og eventyrer. Tom Reiss rejser bogstaveligt talt land og rige rundt i et forsøg på at komme naermere sandheden om forvandlingskunstnerens Lev Nussimbaums utrolige liv og kommer undervejs ud for møder, der er naesten ligeså dramatiske, overraskende og hjerteskaerende, som hans hovedpersons liv. Tom Reiss: (f. 1964) er amerikansk forfatter og journalist med speciale i den faengende, fortaellende historiske biografi. Reiss er bosiddende i New York og vandt i 2013 den prestigefulde Pulitzer-pris for hans seneste bog "Den sorte greve".
©2016 Lindhardt og Ringhof. Translated by Poul Henrik Westh (P)2016 Lindhardt og Ringhof
Der Orientalist. Auf den Spuren von Essad Bey
Summary
Es sollte ein Leben voller Spannungen und unerwarteter Wendungen werden, das den sensiblen jüdischen Jungen Lev Nussimbaum - 1905 in der aserbaidschanischen Hauptstadt und Ölmetropole Baku geboren - in den Jahren der russischen Revolution über Zentralasien, Persien und die Türkei schließlich bis ins Berlin der Wilden Zwanziger Jahre führte. Dort studierte der Orientalistik, konvertierte zum Islam und trat wie ein kaukasisch-muslimischer Prinz unter dem Namen Essad Bey (alias Kurban Said) auf. Für "Die literarische Welt" schrieb er wöchentliche Beiträge und brillierte durch seine detaillierte Kenntnis des Orients. Bald stieg er zum Medienstar auf und machte sich als Autor auch international einen Namen, unter anderem mit dem noch heute verlegten Bestseller "Ali und Nino". Nach einem Intermezzo in New York zog er nach Wien, floh vor den Nazis nach Italien und starb schließlich einsam und verarmt 1942 in Positano. Tom Reiss zeichnet das faszinierende Porträt einer schillernden Persönlichkeit und ihrer turbulenten Zeit, deren kurze, doch romanhaft anmutende Lebensgeschichte den Leser in den Bann schlägt und tief bewegt. Gekürzte Lesung mit Musik des Ensembles Noisten.
(c)+(p) 2009 Griot Hörbuchverlag GmbH