The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction
Back to the full ranking
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo cover

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

Tom Reiss

2

awards won

22

score

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013. The Three Musketeers! The Count of Monte Cristo! The stories of course are fiction. But here a prize-winning author shows us that the inspiration for the swashbuckling stories was, in fact, Dumas's own father, Alex - the son of a marquis and a black slave. He achieved a giddy ascent from private in the Dragoons to the rank of general; an outsider who had grown up among slaves, he was all for Liberty and Equality. So how did such this extraordinary man get erased by history? Why are there no statues of 'Monsieur Humanity' as his troops called him? The Black Count uncovers what happened and the role Napoleon played in Dumas's downfall. By walking the same ground as Dumas - from Haiti to the Pyramids, Paris to the prison cell at Taranto – Reiss, like the novelist before him, triumphantly resurrects this forgotten hero.

Buy this book at Amazon
Publisher
Random House
Year
2012
ISBN-13
9781448130115
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Alexandre Dumas's father's lifeRace and slavery in revolutionary FranceFrench Revolution and Napoleonic era military history

Other awarded books from Tom Reiss

  • The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West

If you liked The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, you could also like these