The writer puts the events in context and explains what was happening at the time and why, making the story well rounded and more informative than just a single person anecdotes it helps understand motivations and explains some of the extraordinariness of General Alexandre Dumas, a mixed race officer in the french army, Born in St Domingue (Haiti) in 1762, and father of the famous writer and the inspiration to many of his novels, the Count of Monte Cristo, The three of the Musketeers. This is rich detailed biography, the subject and the period are so interesting that is as exciting as the best of fiction.
The result is an enthralling book that entertains, astounds and triumphantly resurrects a lost hero from the world's first multiracial society.Ī rich detailed biography, of a fascinating man. He has walked the streets of Cairo where Dumas' intrepid cavalry charge is still remembered. He has journeyed through the Alps where Dumas scaled unscalable ice cliffs. Long years of research have led him across Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East in search of forgotten documents. Reiss tells this tale with magisterial authority. A brief flowering of freedom and equality was over and forgotten, but Dumas' legacy would live on in the novels of the son who adored him. He engineered his disgrace and imprisonment, and to please the sugar growers reintroduced slavery. By the time Napoleon invaded Egypt, Dumas was his top cavalry commander.īut Napoleon was threatened by the physical prowess and popularity of this black nobleman. His father bought him out of slavery and raised him in France, where Dumas went to the nation's finest schools and fencing academies, and having enrolled in the army became known as France's most handsome and strongest soldier. But six months later, Dumas' fortunes changed.
Things got worse when his father sold him into slavery to pay his passage back to Normandy. Dominigue in 1762, the son of a French nobleman and a sugar plantation slave, General Alexandre Dumas did not have an auspicious start in life.
Who was the real Count of Monte Cristo? In this extraordinary biography, Tom Reiss traces the almost unbelievable life of the man who inspired not only Monte Cristo, but all three of the Musketeers: the novelist's own father.īorn in St. Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
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