Title: The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel
Book Beginnings excerpt:
Friday56 excerpt:
Summary: The story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.
Review: Don and I listened to The Art Thief this past week. It is a well-researched tale of a psychologically complicated, misguided, narcissistic art lover who steals artifacts from museums, galleries, and castles throughout France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland over several years. He steals the art not for financial gain but because he loves the art and wants to have it to look at and to touch. Over the years he and his girlfriend stole over 200 pieces, worth millions, possibly billions. Spoiler alert: to write a book about an art thief, they have to get caught!
The first half of the book focuses on what Stéphane Breitwieser stole, from where, and how he did it. It became really apparent to us that Michael Finkel did some deep sleuthing in order to uncover this level of detail. Indeed, the author says it took him eleven years to research the details in the book, which included not only many interviews with the thief himself but also with his lawyers, the prosecutors, psychologists, and art crime investigators. The book crammed a lot in a short book, weighing in at just over 200 pages.
The audiobook was narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, an American actor, who did really well pronouncing all the French, German, Swiss names and places as the story recounts Stéphane and Anne-Catherine's trips around Europe on their many stealing sprees. We both enjoyed our listening experience with The Art Thief very much.
Ratings: Don -- 4 stars; Anne -- 4.5 stars.
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