John Freely was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926. He dropped out of school at seventeen to join the U.S. Navy for the last two years of World War II, later earning his Ph.D. from New York University and completing his postdoctoral studies at Oxford. He teaches physics at Bosphorous University in Istanbul. John Freely has written more than forty books, including The Lost Messiah, The Grand Turk (both available from Overlook), and Aladdin’s Lamp.