Here are 100 books that Plunder fans have personally recommended if you like
Plunder.
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I’m a Distinguished Professor of art history at CUNY and biographer of artists. I grew up in Atlanta, attended college in Boston, and have worked in New York since my twenties. With a new Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers, I began as curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum, assigned to produce a definitive catalogue of all Edward Hopper’s authentic art. His papers were missing except for his record books that recorded every time a work left for sale, loan, or gift. I traced each work as it left Hopper’s possession and discovered a massive number of undocumented artworks stolen from the estate, which the Whitney still wants to cover up.
This very well-researched and gripping book taught me the meaning of the term “laundering” in the art market and revealed the duplicity of the late art dealer, Larry Fleischman, who both collected and sold stolen antiquities and marketed undocumented works taken from Edward Hopper’s estate.
He didn’t care about provenance or history of ownership and is quoted in this book as saying: “Everything comes from somewhere.”
Although I knew and dealt with Fleishman, I trusted him and was tricked by him.
A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist).
In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall…
My interest in this topic began because of a trip to a museum in 2008. I noticed that a painting had been removed from view and a small piece of paper was hanging on the wall where the painting had been. The paper explained that this piece was involved in a court case revolving around whether or not it had been stolen from its Jewish owner by the Nazis during World War II. Nazi cultural appropriation, looting, suppression, and destruction turned out to be one of the most fascinating stories of the entire war. The research for my historical novel took several years, but it allowed me to write a book based on the facts.
Dagnini’s book focuses specifically on Italy and the amazing stories of Rome, Naples, Florence, and Pisa among others. If you love Italian art and architecture, you will not be able to put this book down. Descriptions of the damage, but also how it was fixed and avoided in some cases, are truly inspiring. Without these Allied personnel, so much more could have been lost.
In 1943, while the world was convulsed by war, a few visionaries -- in the private sector and in the military -- committed to protect Europe's cultural heritage from the indiscriminate ravages of World War II.
In the midst of the conflict, the Allied Forces appointed the monuments officers―a motley group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists―to ensure that the great masterworks of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. The journalist Ilaria Dagnini Brey focuses her spellbinding account on the monuments officers of Italy, quickly dubbed "the Venus Fixers" by bemused troops.
I practiced law for more than twenty years before becoming an author. After writing several children's science books, in 2016 I turned to writing about civics and government. The internet was overflowing with politicians' misstatements about the Constitution, and I realized many Americans didn't understand fundamental democratic principles. I decided to write a book addressing kids, to help them appreciate their rights, obligations, and powers under the Constitution. In Free for You and Me, I focused on the First Amendment.I believe that talking with young people about the issues raised in all the books listed here will help us raise our kids to be informed and engaged community members.
This is a wonderful, uplifting story that provides a springboard for conversations about how governments don't all give their people the same rights. It showcases an incident during the pro-democracy demonstrations of the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt. As a bonus, this book also celebrates the tremendous value of libraries. It tells the stirring (and true) tale of people of all stripes joining hands to defend the great library of Alexandria against possible damage during the unrest.
As with the other recommended books, children are a key part of the story's action. The narration is kid-friendly and engaging and the collage-style illustrations are bright and bouyant. Finally, the back matter will intrigue readers with photographs of the library's light-filled interiors, as well as photos of the dramatic defense of the library during the demonstrations.
The inspiring true story of demonstrators standing up for the love of a library, from a New York Times bestselling illustrator
In January 2011, in a moment that captured the hearts of people all over the world, thousands of Egypt's students, library workers, and demonstrators surrounded the great Library of Alexandria and joined hands, forming a human chain to protect the building. They chanted "We love you, Egypt!" as they stood together for the freedom the library represented.
Illustrated with Susan L. Roth's stunning collages, this amazing true story demonstrates how the love of books and libraries can unite a…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I am a history professor at Boston University, where I teach and write about modern American popular thought, political culture, trade, travel, and war especially in urban and transnational contexts. I enjoy histories that are based on deep and creative bodies of research and that push past timeworn myths and clichés about the American past.
I just love it when a topic that sounds dull—in this case librarians and archivists during World War II—turns out to be unexpectedly rich and interesting.
Peiss recounts in riveting detail the highly successful wartime mission that sent teams of scholars and other bookish types to scour Europe’s bookstores and basements for rare and otherwise valuable publications. Amassing truckloads of printed material not only aided the Allies’ intelligence operations but also restored looted property, demobilized Nazi propaganda, and, ultimately, transformed the holdings of American research libraries.
While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to collect books and documents to aid the military cause. Galvanized by the events of war into acquiring and preserving the written word, as well as providing critical information for intelligence purposes, these American civilians set off on missions to gather foreign publications and information across Europe. They journeyed to neutral cities in search of enemy texts, followed a step behind advancing armies to capture records, and seized Nazi…
Since discovering the myths and legends of the world at college, I’ve fallen in love with these and the countries and cities where they originated. Teaching the literature that evolved from this for so many years deepened my fascination with the ancient/medieval worlds. I literally pounce on any books I come across, fiction and non-fiction. All of my novels draw from these worlds and are a thrill to write and read. However, life was extremely hard back then, and I wouldn’t want to have lived back then! I hope you join me in exploring these fascinating reads.
I have to admit that it’s the title that drew me to this book in the first place. As a retired English teacher, the word Librarians intrigued me. A true story, The Bad-Ass Librariansopened up a whole new world of manuscripts over 500 years that I never knew existed! The courage of the preservers of these works surprised and humbled me. But, it is also a historical history of smugglers and the heroic actions of the dedicated people of Timbuktu to preserve their heritage even if it meant their death. You won’t be able to put this down.
In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert shepherds. His goal: to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door. Joshua Hammer writes about how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world's greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction.…
I was born in Quebec, have lived in eleven countries, and speak four languages. In my 20+ years as an author and journalist, my goal has always been to create bridges between cultures and to tell stories that enable individuals to better understand each other. For me, a trip to a new country, no matter how short or long, is incomplete unless I’ve had the chance to meet locals.
This book is a ‘gold standard’ piece of investigative journalism, a travelogue about a people I will probably never meet, rolled into the intriguing history of a unique city.
The book interweaves the tale of the efforts local people made to save priceless manuscripts from al-Qaida in 2012 with the West’s fascination of fabled Timbuktu since the 18th century.
It is an un-put-downable example of creative non-fiction at its most interesting and easily readable.
Two tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.
The fabled city of Timbuktu has captured the Western imagination for centuries. The search for this 'African El Dorado' cost the lives of many explorers but Timbuktu is rich beyond its legends. Home to many thousands of ancient manuscripts on poetry, history, religion, law, pharmacology and astronomy, the city has been…
"Captain Charles Kennedy" parachuted into a moonlit Austrian forest and searched frantically for his lost radio set. His real name was Leo Hillman and he was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. He was going home. Men and women of Churchill’s secret Special Operations Executive worked to free Austria from Hitler's…
World War 2 has always interested me and my curiosity was strengthened a few years ago when my mother told me I was born illegitimate and my father had been the civil engineer building a nearby bomber airfield and a lodger with her parents. She was ashamed of what happened and lost contact with my father before I was born. Consequently, I wrote my first novel Unplanned. I then met the daughter of the Berlin mother in Abandoned in Berlin, and found itnatural to pursue this story, given what I had discovered about my own upbringing. The effort has taught me to seek to forgive but never to forget.
The plundering of books by the Nazis, especially literature belonging to the Jewish community, is the topic of this novel. Many books are untraceable today and their legitimate owners are long since dead. Nazis confiscated literature for various reasons, some involving original manuscripts, others used to seek out the enemies of the Reich, and quantities were gathered as status indicators. Once the war was over, there were book collections taken for a second time and justified as “liberated” rather than “plundered!”
I enjoyed the novel because it covers an aspect of the Holocaust that is rarely addressed and offers insights into what happened to many books that disappeared from Jewish collections during Nazi times. We know there was a book store on the ground floor of the apartment block in my story and that the family belonged to a publishing dynasty. But no one survives today to tell us what…
"A most valuable book." —Christian Science Monitor
For readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.
While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new research that included records saved by the Monuments Men themselves—Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins…
After seventeen years of researching media use in the Soviet Union, I found I was hooked for life on the problems of totalitarianism. I went on reading about Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the East German Stasi and wrote several novels based on what I had read. In 2009, I saw an exhibition of paintings called “Looking for Owners.” Some of the pictures were extremely beautiful works by well-known artists which, I was surprised to learn, had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Their rightful owners had never been traced. I knew at once that there was a story in this.
Without the Monuments Men, the artworks plundered by the Nazis might never have been recovered. A lot might still be missing.
The Monuments Men were art experts, scholars, and historians who had volunteered for a specially-formed military unit. They followed the Allied armies through Europe and made sure no historical monuments or irreplaceable artworks were inadvertently destroyed. Using Rose Valland’s notes from the Jeu de Paume, they tracked down stolen treasures in castles, monasteries, and even a salt mine!
Engaging and well-written, this book is a must-read. I borrowed it from the library, but ended up buying my own copy. I had to have it!
Now a major film starring GEORGE CLOONEY, MATT DAMON, CATE BLANCHETT, BILL MURRAY, JOHN GOODMAN, HUGH BONNEVILLE, BOB BALABAN, JEAN DUJARDIN and DIMITRI LEONIDAS. What if I told you that there was an epic story about World War II that has not been told, involving the most unlikely group of heroes? What if I told you there was a group of men on the front lines who didn't carry machine guns or drive tanks; a new kind of soldier, one charged with saving, not destroying. From caves to castles in a thrilling race against time, these men risked their lives…
I’m a journalist, critic, and poet who has spent a career engaging with the world. I love telling stories, and I strive to put beauty and tension into everything I write. I’ve had great editors – they’ve published my work in The Guardian, National Geographic, ARTnews, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, and Archaeology, where I am a contributing editor, and many other places – but it always comes down to me and my computer. And often a plane ticket and a suitcase.
No book exposes the tricks of the trade that smugglers and dealers use to launder looted artifacts like this one. Focusing on a wave of looting in southern Italy in the 1980s and ‘90s, the authors show how European and American millionaire collectors fueled the ransacking of ancient sites. It’s a substantive, entertaining read about crime and the contradictions of modern Italy by two brilliant writers.
The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli ,tomb raiders, who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers who spirit them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums. Peter Watson, a former…
Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle against the Nazi Occupation of France takes readers into the moral labyrinth of the Occupation years, 1940-45, to examine how the medical community dealt with the evil authority imposed on them. Anti-Jewish laws prevented many doctors from practicing, inspiring many to form secret medical…
I'm Associate Professor of Economics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, USA. My expertise is in conflict, war, and peace economics. I'm deeply motivated to understand the broader impacts of violent conflicts in low-income countries with the hope that doing so will pave the way for us to live in a more harmonious world. Recently, I've been interested in economics of cultural heritage destruction during violent conflicts. My aim is to understand patterns of heritage destruction in the past such that we can incorporate heritage destruction in atrocity forecasting models of today. I'm just as passionate to teach what I have learned over the years and what I'm curious to explore in the future.
I recommend this book because it is in part a historical account of wartime architecture destruction, in part a compilation of academic literature on causes and consequences of architecture destruction, and in part a cautionary note on post-war reconstruction of public memory.
With a detailed and vivid description of cultural destruction, Bevan weaves a latticework of examples that helps readers find common threads across seemingly different events.
Whether a war is emergent, on-folding, or terminated, such as the war in Ukraine, Israel-Hamas war, and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the book serves as a roadmap that helps us understand the inextricable link between people and their culture and shows how architectural destruction is most visible as ‘wars greatest picture’ but also least observed as wars greatest fatality.
A decimated Shiite shrine in Iraq. The smoking World Trade Center site. The scorched cityscape of 1945 Dresden. Among the most indelible scars left by war is the destroyed landscapes, and such architectural devastation damages far more than mere buildings. Robert Bevan argues here"that shattered buildings are not merely "collateral damage," but rather calculated acts of cultural annihilation.From Hitler's Kristallnacht to the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in the Iraq War, Bevan deftly sifts through military campaigns and their tactics throughout history, and analyzes the cultural impact and catastrophic consequences of architectural destruction. For Bevan, these actions are nothing less…
