Tom Reiss: Difference between revisions

Tom Reiss (born May 5, 1964) is an American author and journalist who lives in New York City. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Reiss is also the author of The Orientalist, a biography of Lev Nussimbaum.

Reiss was born in Texas on May 5, 1964, the eldest of four children of a neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist. He grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. He was educated at Hotchkiss School in Connecticut from which he went to Harvard University where he concentrated in history, writing an undergraduate thesis on the origins of the Boy Scout Movement in Edwardian Britain. He spent much of his early adult life travelling. He spent extensive periods living in Japan (where he was briefly a movie actor and model). Later he went to Germany where he infiltrated Neo-Nazi networks at the end of the 1980s, taking the name "Tom Rossi" to hide his own German-Jewish ancestry, an experience which underlay Führer-Ex (1996), co-written with Ingo Hasselbach and filmed in 2002. He later visited the Caucasus region; it was there, in Baku, that he first wandered into the story which later became The Orientalist.

Reiss is a highly-skilled horseman and a crack shot, speaks 17 languages (including Albanian and Uzbek), and is famous for his capacity to go for days without sleep. Reiss is married and has two daughters.

There is reason to doubt the above assertion that he "speaks 17 languages". In an interview with French TV on his self-promoting web-site, Mr Reiss responds to the French interviewer in English (his answers are subtitled in French) - something that would make him the laughing stock of the local French audience, and rebut the presumption of his being multi-lingual.

The Orientalist is an investigative narrative of the life and times of Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942), a writer who was born to a Jewish family in Baku and who converted to Islam, reinventing himself in Berlin as Essad Bey and Kurban Said and publishing numerous bestselling books under those pseudonyms.

• Promotional Website for Tom Reiss's book The Orientalist

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