The Book Thieves

Ceremonial book burnings and the theft of precious art works are well-known elements of Nazi Germany’s rampage through Europe. In The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Swedish journalist Anders Rydell tells the less familiar story of how two Nazi agencies—the intelligence wing of the…

Read More

City of Light, City of Poison

One of the advantages (or disadvantages depending on the day) of hanging out with writers and spending time on the internet fringes of the publishing industry* is that you have advance warning of books before they reach the bookstores. Sometimes the wait is torture. Holly Tucker‘s latest book, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder,…

Read More

Imprisoned

In 1979, at the age of 56, Italian writer and artist Arturo Benvenuti and his wife drove across Europe in a motor home in search of former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. He saw the journey as a secular Via Crucis—a pilgrimage in which the Stations of the Cross were Auschwitz, Terezin, Mauthausen and Buchenwald.…

Read More