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 Schutzstaffel (SS) under Heinrich Himmler and the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce headed by Alfred Rosenberg --competed to plunder Europe's libraries until the regime's fall in 1945.
The Nazis' motivation for the theft and dismemberment of libraries was different from that which inspired the looting of precious artworks from museums and private homes. The stolen books were intended to supply Nazi "research" libraries with the raw material for an intellectual war between Nazism and its enemies. Jewish libraries, public and private, were the primary targets, but the agencies also attacked libraries dedicated to Freemasonry, socialism and the occult. Plunder was followed by destruction. Collections were divided up between different research institutes and warehouses. Books that were not deemed valuable, whether for their rarity or for research, were often destroyed.
The Book Thieves is written in the form of a quest. Rydell travels across Europe, visiting the remains of plundered libraries and the institutions that still hold many of the stolen books. He talks to librarians who are engaged in the overwhelming task of identifying stolen books and their owners, those attempting to rebuild lost collections, and those who mourn the libraries that are lost without a trace. In the process, he tells the story of how the collections were built and the heroic attempts to protect them, creating a vivid and heartbreaking picture of lost communities and lost knowledge.
A version of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
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, Magic and the First Police Chief of Paris, was worth the wait.
Tucker walks the tightrope between scholarship and storytelling with practiced bravado.
City of Light, City of Poison is as tightly structured as an Agatha Christie mystery. She opens with a letter from a dead man and the hint of a past mystery. She follows newly appointed police chief Nicolas de la Reynie step-by-step as his investigation of two brutal murders leads him to discover a deadly network of witches, poisoners, and blasphemers with connections perilously close to the king himself.*** (His investigation also causes him to invent a seventeenth century version of forensic science, including chemical--or at least alchemical--analysis of poisons.) She places his investigation inside the sometimes vicious politics of Versailles with a sure hand. The story had me in its grip from page one. In fact, I read it when I should have been reading books related to my work.****
In a fascinating epilogue, she draws aside the curtain and shares her process of research and writing with the reader, leaving no doubt about the rigor of her scholarship.
Tucker's last book, Blood Work, was excellent. This book is in a different league altogether. With City of Light, City of Poison she enters the rare list of authors who write historical non-fiction that is truly as gripping as a novel.*****
*Some writers plunge neck deep into publishing news and gossip. To me that feels like plunging up to your neck in swampy water, with a strong possibility of leeches.** I prefer wading in at the edges of a clear mountain river. But I digress.
**If you're picturing Hepburn and Bogart in The African Queen you've got the idea.
***I now have even more admiration for my colleagues at Shelf Awareness who review fiction. Avoiding spoilers while maintaining a sense of the story is hard work.
****I'm paying for it now, but it was worth it.
*****Erik Lawson, David McCullough, Barbara Tuchman, Simon Winchester--like that.
What Makes a Mosque, Part Five: America’s Oldest Mosque
By Jonathunder - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49833486
If you listen to the news, you’d think that Islamic immigrants to the United States are something new. They’re not.
Beginning in the 1880s and ending only when the United States closed the door on non-European immigrants in 1924, Muslims from Ottoman-controlled Syria joined the rush to emigrate to America. Like their European counterparts, most of the Syrians who came to America were single young men who intended to work for several years and then go home to find wives. Like their European counterparts, most of them made a home and stayed.
The majority of the Syrian immigrants settled in northeastern cities. A few found their way further west. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, became the unlikely home of a growing Islamic community.
The Syrians who settled in the Midwest worked as peddlers, selling dry goods and notions to farm wives in the days before Montgomery Wards and Sears put their catalogs in every rural mailbox. As soon as they could afford it, they sent for their brothers, and then their wives, to join them. The most successful accumulated enough money to open small stores and to stake a new immigrant to his first peddler's pack. By the 1920s, Arab-owned shops were common in the upper Midwest. In Cedar Rapids alone there were 50 Arab-owned groceries.
The Islamic community of Cedar Rapids soon grew too large to hold the Friday prayer in individual homes. In 1920, they rented a hall and converted it into a mosque. Like the congregation of every storefront church in America, the Muslims of Cedar Rapids dreamed of the day they would worship in a building designed for the purpose. In 1929, they began to build the second American mosque.* The Depression slowed them down, but didn’t stop them. In the best American tradition of barn-raising, young men from the congregation did much of the work themselves. In 1934, the mosque was complete.
The builders of the mosque may have come from the Middle East, but the new mosque was pure Midwest: a small white clapboard building with a cinder-block foundation. The only thing that distinguished it from a country church or a one-room schoolhouse was the small green dome over the front door. Even the crescent-topped spire looked more like a church steeple than a minaret.
In their own way, the Muslims of Cedar Rapids built a domed mosque in the Ottoman tradition. Every Ottoman mosque provided essential social services to the community it served. In sixteenth century Istanbul, that meant attaching a public bath or a soup kitchen to a mosque; in twentieth century America it meant a basement social hall for weddings, parties, and bingo. Move over, Suleyman.
Today there are more than one thousand mosques in America.They range in style and size from unobtrusive storefront prayer rooms to the Islamic Cultural Center on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. Most are located in buildings originally designed for another purpose: office buildings, bowling alleys, abandoned stores. Like mosques built in Istanbul, Timbuktu, or Jakarta, those built specifically as mosques are constructed in styles and materials that reflect the local community's ideas about what a mosque should look like. Some use traditional designs borrowed from Islamic lands. Some re-interpret traditional design with American elements. Others are blazingly modern. The one thing they all have in common, with each other and with every other mosque around that world, is that one wall that directs the faithful towards Mecca.
*The first mosque was built in Ross, North Dakota earlier that year. It is no longer standing.