Many people know the myth of Dracula, but very few know that he was in fact a real person, an fifteenth century ruler of the Romanian people. Still, less people realize that the books they read about the subject are mostly the product of the imagination of the authors. In The Impaler: A Biography of Vlad III Dracula, author Alexandru Buican aims to limit strictly to historical sources-Romanians, Hungarians, Turkish, Latin-letting them speak for themselves, intending no less then to give the book on the historical Dracula. However uncomfortable may be for the modern reader, the facts about real Dracula's life are presented with no exaggerations, without any attempt to avoid the psychological fact that made the fifteenth century scholar Michael Beheim, a contemporary, to refer to so bluntly: "From all the madmen and all the / tyrants I have ever heard of / in this world / and under these skies, / within living memory, / no other has been more cruel."