The most recommended books about looting

Plunder combined three of my favorite things in one unputdownable story: art history, Italy, and the Napoleonic Era.

Veronese's enormous Wedding Feast at Cana, painted for the refectory wall at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, was seized with other masterpieces when Napoleon overcame the Austrians and wouldn't take Venice's neutrality as an answer. To this day it hangs in the Louvre, largely (pun intended) ignored because it’s opposite the Mona Lisa.

Salzman traces the common historic habit of swooping in like vultures during wartime to build one’s art collection, and for the first time I understood why Hitler thought himself justified in his own artistic pilfering!

Set in the eighteenth century, with a rich cast of characters and an intriguing plot, this book was a feast!

I stumbled upon Tania James’ book at the airport and devoured more than half of it during the three-hour flight home. The story interweaves romance and adventure and serves as a “sliding door” into the lasting impact of colonialism.

The hero of the story is seventeen-year-old Abbas, the finest woodcarver in his hometown of Mysore, India. He is snatched up by the sultan to work with a master French watchmaker to create an unforgettable automaton to celebrate the return of the Sultan's sons from being held hostage by the English.

Tipu's Tiger is a wonder, and Abbas is completely enamored with learning to create mechanisms and opportunities for learning with the Frenchman Lucien Du Leze. There were so many interesting characters and crisscrossing plots that I was glued to every… show more.

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.   

I chose photo books for my list because I often use photos to help me as I write—either to construct a scene or to provide detail. Because my books are set against the backdrop of the Monuments Men’s work, this book was really the starting point for my writing the trilogy.  

Edsel presents a methodical overview of the vast scope of Nazi art theft in Europe, the destruction wrought on its monuments, and the enormous task of restitution and rebuilding. Seeing the sheer quantity of looted art stacked ceiling-high in endless rows and the faces of the men and women charged with making it right helped me put their work into my fictional work.

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.

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 Librarians opened 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.

This is a pioneering, extraordinarily well-documented exposé of how famous museums have filled their shelves with looted artifacts and more than a few fakes – which, the author explains, tend to flock together. The author was a whistle-blowing curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He knows his stuff. So why was I reluctant to recommend this title?  Because it’s so hard to find and, with hundreds of photographs, costs upwards of $100. If you can find a used copy, grab it, and if your local library has it, kiss a librarian and make a donation.

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.

Hermann Goering’s art dealer was a Nazi stormtrooper with a PhD in art history and an athletic build. And Bruno Lohse always made sure the champagne was on ice whenever Hermann Goering arrived at Paris’ Jeu de Paume museum in order to examine the latest in stolen masterpieces.

Although Lohse was arrested after the war for his ties to the Nazi party and spent several years in prison in Germany and France, he was never convicted for his role in stealing art, and went on to make a good living as an art dealer in Munich after the war. Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College and expert on the Holocaust, interviewed Lohse several times for this fascinating book.

Many people know of the art thefts conducted by the Nazis in WWII.

In this book, Edsel reveals the story of tracing these treasures through the POV of the Monuments Men, the special group of American and British men tasked with identifying and rescuing these stolen art treasures. The unfolding of their struggles and the location of these art pieces is fascinating – done behind enemy lines while the war still raged.

It was literally a race against time in some instances, as when they were trying to locate the hoard eventually found in the Austrian salt mine, for it was scheduled to be blown up. A gripping, true tale of a “mission impossible” that reads like a thriller – but the main thrill is that it’s real.