Born to an aristocratic French father and a slave mother in Saint-Domingue, Dumas became a general in the French Revolution and served under Napoleon, by turns lauded as a hero and vilified as a black insurgent. Dumas’ final residence and the military archives at the Chateau de Vincennes, the author provides a vivid sense of who Dumas was and how he attained such heights and fell so low after the French Revolution, being nearly forgotten by the time of his death in 1806. If you have ever loved The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers- indeed any of the great author's work-then The Black Count is a must for your personal Dumas canon.A compelling new work by literary detective Reiss ( The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, 2005) tracks the wildly improbable career of Alexandre Dumas’ mixed-race father. Riveting, heartwrenching, improbable, Reiss does for us what Alexander Dumas could not. Reiss's seemingly effortless writing style thrusts us into not only the adventure of this dynamic figure, but also of Reiss's own detective work, which is a story in of itself. Tim Reiss's Pulitzer Prize winning "The Black Count" beautifully captures the obsession of a son to write a beloved father back into the remembrance of a once adulating public.
Tim Reiss plunges us into the unfathomable exploits of a black general successfully erased from popular history at the behest of Napoleon Bonapart, whose own rise attracted the sponsorship of the reigning sugar and slave trades that made France a world power. And at the helm, Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Reiss tells us, stood a figure resplendent in stature, dwarfing Napoleon's own domineering presence and troubling his ambitions, France's pride and heart of the republican cause, the mixed race Haitian born General Alex Dumas. Though largely forgotten today, 18th century France pioneered the world's first civil right's movement. 1790s France was a renaissance of social justice.
0 kommentar(er)
