Alexander Münninghoff was born in Posen, Poland, in 1944. A journalist and expert on Russia, he won the prize for newspaper journalism (a Dutch Pulitzer), and is the author of Tropical Years in Moscow, about his time as a correspondent in the Soviet Union. A passionate chess player, Münninghoff wrote the biographies of Dutch chess grand master Jan Hein Donner, and the chess master he dethroned, mathematician Max Euwe. In the anti-German postwar years and throughout his career, Münninghoff never told his friends or colleagues about his family, the complex chronology of which he reveals in his memoir, The Son and Heir.