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September 2009 · New books · Previous · Next   PDF

New Books

By Benjamin Moser

I’ve developed some strategies for making my way through the paper forest that grows more lush with each visit to the post office, a profusion of books, galleys, and manuscripts that I instinctually divide into those that, for reasons of personal or professional piety, I feel I must look at; and those that I immediately, unhesitatingly want to look at, usually because they speak to one or another of my pet interests.

One such, as it happens, is vanished, faked, or looted art. I love a Van Eyck in a salt mine. I savor a discussion on the fate of the Czartoryski Raphael or the Amber Room. I was one of maybe ten people who read all three recent books about the Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren. So when Ilaria Dagnini Brey’s the VENUS FIXERS (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25) turned up in my P.O. box, there was never any question of resisting “the untold story of the Allied soldiers who saved Italy’s art during World War II.”

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SEE ALSO: Amigoland (Book); Brey, Ilaria Dagnini; Informers (Book); Vásquez, Juan Gabriel; Rothfield, Lawrence; Casares, Oscar; Rape of Mesopotamia: behind the looting of the Iraq Museum (Book); The Venus fixers (Book)

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