Book Review: The Black Count

Alexandre Dumas is known for great works of historical fiction featuring swashbuckling heroes like the Count of Monte Cristo. But few people know that there was a real Count of Monte Cristo - his father, Alex Dumas. The son of a disgraced nobleman and a Haitian slave, Alex Dumas arrived in France on the eve of the Revolution and rose to become a General in the Revolutionary Army, only to be betrayed by Napoleon and forgotten by history.

The Black Count tells the story of this tumultuous historical period - a time of democratic ideals and the guillotine, of unprecedented racial equality and the power to undo it overnight - with an engaging tone that makes this work of nonfiction as compulsively readable as fiction. Alex Dumas's amazing military victories are an edge-of-your-seat read, but the book is also a fascinating history of the French Revolution and its many social changes, the rise of Napoleon and the undoing of many Revolutionary ideals, and the transition to the difficult world where Dumas the novelist found himself - and where the author struggles to uncover long-buried facts about this remarkable figure. A compelling account of a history you might not have known. - Michelle (Sunset)