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Title details for The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel - Available

The Monuments Men

Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

by Robert Edsel
Jeremy Davidson
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available

Now a major motion film!
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account from Robert Edsel and Bret Witter follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 15, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781427209412
      • File size: 410479 KB
      • Duration: 14:15:09

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This book recounts how a small group of art historians and restorers, curators, and archivists sought to save art treasures during WWII. It reads more like an adventure novel than a mere retelling of history, especially after the unit's mission changes from preserving treasures from bombing to recovering looted artwork. And that's the tone that reader Jeremy Davidson delivers. He varies the pacing effectively, based on the nature of the text. He speeds up slightly during exciting action-filled sequences. He reads letters and documents with a flatter tone, making it easy for listeners to discern when the document stops and the author's words resume. He also gives a slight but not intrusive or cartoonish British accent to quotations by Britishers. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 22, 2009
      WWII was the most destructive war in history and caused the greatest dislocation of cultural artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of items remain missing. The main burden fell to a few hundred men and women, curators and archivists, artists and art historians from 13 nations. Their task was to save and preserve what they could of Europe's great art, and they were called the Monuments Men. (Coincidentally or not, this book appears only briefly after Ilaria Dagnini Brey's The Venus Fixers: The Untold Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II
      , Reviews, June 1.) Edsel has presented their achievements in documentaries and photographs. He and Witter (coauthor of the bestselling Dewey
      ) are no less successful here. Focusing on the organization's role in northwest Europe, they describe the Monuments Men from their initial mission to limit combat damage to structures and artifacts to their changed focus of locating missing items. Most had been stolen by the Nazis. In southern Germany alone, over a thousand caches emerged, containing everything from church bells to insect collections. The story is both engaging and inspiring. In the midst of a total war, armies systematically sought to mitigate cultural loss.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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