If you are looking for a new book for your summer reading list, why not choose an award-winning work by a Mercy College professor?
Dr. Eric Martone, Interim Dean of the School of Education, recently won an Independent Publisher Book Award (also known as an “IPPY”) for his 2018 book “Finding Monte Cristo: Alexandre Dumas and the French Atlantic World,” which was published by McFarland & Company. The book won the Silver Medal in the Europe – Best Regional Non-Fiction category.
Martone explained his work is the culmination of 10 years of research and other publications on Dumas and incorporates unpublished primary sources from around the world.
According to a summary of the book, Martone explores how Dumas, grandson of a Caribbean slave and author of ‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ faced racial prejudice in his homeland of France and constantly searched for a sense of belonging. For Dumas, ‘Monte Cristo’ symbolized this elusive quest. It was a similar quest for those living in France’s former colonies, as nineteenth and twentieth century black intellectuals from the Caribbean and Africa drew on Dumas’s work and celebrity to renegotiate their full acceptance as French citizens. Their efforts were influenced by earlier struggles of African Americans in the decades after the Civil War, who celebrated Dumas as a black American hero.
“National identities are elastic and change over time, establishing the boundaries for inclusion and exclusion of certain groups,” said Martone, whose research is influenced in part by Mercy’s commitment to diversity. “Understanding this process is crucial to developing means to promote greater equity and social inclusion in contemporary society.”
This is the 23rd annual Independent Publisher Book Awards contest, honoring the year’s best published titles in various fiction and non-fiction categories from academic and non-academic independent publishers, university presses, and self-published books. It is the largest and most competitive awards program for independently published books in the English-speaking world.
An awards reception will be held on May 28, 2019, at the Copacabana in New York City.
For more information on the 2019 IPPY Awards, please visit here.