The Brimstone Journals


Ron Koertge - 2001
    . . and Boyd, an Angry Young Man who has just made a dangerous new friend. Now he’s making a list.The Branston High School Class of 2001. You might think you know them. You might be surprised.Narrated by fifteen teenage characters, this startling, often poignant poetic novel evokes a suburban high school both familiar and terrifying — and provides an ideal opportunity for young adults to discuss violence in schools.

Louvre: All the Paintings


Erich Lessing - 2011
    Comes with an enclosed, supportive DVD-ROM The Louvre is the world's most visited art museum, with 8.5 million visitors annually, and houses the most celebrated and important paintings of all time. For the first time ever, The Louvre: All the Paintings collects all 2,981 paintings currently on display in the permanent collection in one beautifully curated volume. Organized and divided into the four main painting collections of the museum— the Italian School, the Northern School, the Spanish School, and the French School— the paintings are then presented chronologically by the artist's date of birth.Four hundred of the most iconic and significant paintings are illuminated with 300-word discussions by art historians Anja Grebe and Vincent Pomarède on the key attributes of the work, what to look for when viewing the painting, the artist's inspirations and techniques, biographical information on the artist, the artist's impact on the history of art, and more. All 2,981 paintings are fully annotated with the name of the painting and artist, the date of the work, the birth and death dates of the artist, the medium that was used, the size of the painting, the Louvre catalog number, and the room in the Louvre in which the painting is found. The DVD-ROM is easily browsable by artist, date, school, art historical genre, or location in the Louvre. This last feature allows readers to tour the Louvre and its contents room by room, as if they were actually walking through the building.

Rescuing Da Vinci


Robert M. Edsel - 2006
    This book includes their heroics and exploits in rescuing and safeguarding the world's great artworks.

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide


Luke Hart - 2018
    He then committed suicide. Luke and Ryan Hart, the two surviving sons, open up about their experiences growing up and the circumstances surrounding the murders. They hope to highlight the patterns of behaviour in coercive control and its deadly consequences, improving public awareness and leading to informed discussion on domestic abuse.

Treasure Palaces: Great Writers Discover Some of the World's Greatest Museums


Maggie Fergusson - 2016
    These essays, collected from the pages of The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all.In his ode to the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, Mexico, the great novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes writes, “Museums, like lovers, can lose their charms. But the next time can always be the first time.” William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna—a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Musée in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke,” a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History—which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack.Treasure Palaces is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our world’s most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art.

A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump


Lonnie G. Bunch III - 2019
    His story is by turns inspiring, funny, frustrating, quixotic, bittersweet, and above all, a compelling read.In its first four months of operation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture surpassed one million visits and quickly became a cherished, vital monument to the African American experience. And yet this accomplishment was never assured. In A Fool's Errand, founding director Lonnie Bunch tells his story of bringing his clear vision and leadership to bear to realize this shared dream of many generations of Americans.Outlining the challenges of site choice, architect selection, building design, and the compilation of an unparalleled collection of African American artifacts, Bunch also delves into his personal struggles--especially the stress of a high-profile undertaking--and the triumph of establishing such an institution without mentors or guidebooks to light the way. His memoir underscores his determination to create a museum that treats the black experience as an essential component of every American's identity.This inside account of how Bunch planned, managed, and executed the museum's mission informs and inspires not only readers working in museums, cultural institutions, and activist groups, but also those in the nonprofit and business worlds who wish to understand how to succeed--and do it spectacularly--in the face of major political, structural, and financial challenges.

Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum


Michael Gross - 2009
    Now, Michael Gross gives us the first unauthorized and definitive history of the museum and the juicy details of the lives of the powerful players who made it what it is today. With a colorful cast of characters that includes directors Guy-Philippe Lannes de Montebello, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, and Thomas P. F. Hoving, and a glittering array of supporting players such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Annette de la Renta, J. P. Morgan, Brooke Astor, Robert Moses, Diana Vreeland, and Jane Wrightsman, Gross looks at the museum’s rich social history and exposes the secrets behind the upper class’s cultural and philanthropic ambitions. From the trustees to the donors and the curators to the collectors, the startling 138-year tale of the Met and the masterpieces that live inside its walls makes for an astonishing and satisfying read.

Dakota Crumb: Tiny Treasure Hunter


Jamie Michalak - 2021
    As the clock in the great museum tick-toocks pas midnight, a little mouse with a sack and a treasure map scurries past the guards. Plucky and intrepid Dakota Crumb scours the museum for artifacts, including the rare purple jewel of Cairo (a gumdrop stashed in an exhibit). By day, the little mouse shares her carefully curated finds with fellow tiny creatures that flock to Miss Crumb’s tiny Mousehole Museum. A feast for sharp-eyed readers—who’ll delight in circling back after the story to pore over the illustrations in search of treasure—this gently suspenseful tale, splashed with soft, dusky hues, evokes a world of wonders after dark.

The Van Gogh Deception


Deron R. Hicks - 2017
    As the stakes continue to rise, the boy must piece together the disjointed clues of his origins while using his limited knowledge to stop one of the greatest art frauds ever attempted. Digitally interactive, this museum mystery offers QR codes woven throughout the book that bring renowned paintings to readers’ fingertips.

The Sixty-Eight Rooms


Marianne Malone - 2010
    Housed in the Children's Galleries of the Chicago Art Institute, they are a collection of 68 exquisitely crafted miniature rooms made in the 1930s by Mrs. James Ward Thorne. Each of the 68 rooms is designed in the style of a different historic period, and every detail is perfect, from the knobs on the doors to the candles in the candlesticks. Some might even say, the rooms are magic. Imagine--what if you discovered a key that allowed you to shrink so that you were small enough to sneak inside and explore the rooms' secrets? What if you discovered that others had done so before you? And that someone had left something important behind?Fans of Chasing Vermeer, The Doll People, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler will be swept up in the magic of this exciting art adventure!

Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts


John Barelli - 2019
    For the first time, John Barelli shares his experiences of the crimes that occurred on his watch; the investigations that captured thieves and recovered artwork; the lessons he learned and shared with law enforcement professionals in the United States and abroad; the accidents and near misses; and a few mysteries that were sadly never solved. He takes readers behind the scenes at the Met, introduces curators and administrators, walks the empty corridors after hours, and shares what it's like to get the call that an ancient masterpiece has gone missing. The Metropolitan Museum covers twelve acres in the heart of Manhattan and is filled with five thousand years of work by history's great artists known and unknown: Goya, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Warhol, Pollack, Egyptian mummies, Babylonian treasures, Colonial crafts, and Greek vases. John and a small staff of security professionals housed within the Museum were responsible for all of it. Over the years, John helped make the museum the state-of-the-art facility it is today and created a legacy in art security for decades to come. Focusing on six thefts but filled with countless stories that span the late 1970s on into the 21st century, John opens the files on thefts, shows how museum personnel along with local and sometimes Federal Agents opened investigations and more often than not caught the thief. But of ultimate importance was the recovery of the artwork, including Celtic and Egyptian gold, French tapestries, Greek sculpture, and more. At the heart of this book there will always be art--those who love it and those who take it, two groups of people that are far from mutually exclusive.

Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art


Philip Hook - 2017
    In a richly anecdotal chronological narrative he describes the rise and occasional fall of the extraordinary men and women who over the centuries have made it their business to sell art to kings, merchants, nobles, entrepreneurs, and museums. From its beginnings in Antwerp, where paintings were sometimes sold by weight, to the rich hauteur of the contemporary gallery in New York, Paris, and London, art dealing has, he shows, been about identifying what is intangible but infinitely desirable, and then finding clients for whom it is irresistible. Those who have purveyed art for a living range from tailors, spies, and the occasional anarchist to scholars, aristocrats, merchants, and connoisseurs, each variously motivated by greed, belief in their own vision of art and its history, or simply the will to win. Philip Hook’s history is one of human folly, and greed—yet ingenuity and heroism. Rogues’ Gallery is learned, witty, and irresistibly readable.

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America


Kathleen Belew - 2018
    Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.Belew's disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.

The Shetland Sea Murders


Marsali Taylor - 2021
    A fishing vessel has become trapped on the rocks off the coast of one of the islands.In the days that follow, there's both a shocking murder and a baffling death. On the surface there's no link, but when Cass becomes involved it is soon clear that her life is also in danger.Convinced that someone sinister is at work in these Shetland waters, Cass is determined to find and stop them. But uncovering the truth could prove to be deadly . .

Deadly Mistress: A True Story of Marriage, Betrayal and Murder (St. Martin's True Crime Library)


Michael Fleeman - 2005
    MURDER GONE West Coast doctor Kenneth Stahl would do anything to free himself from his wife Carolyn. Then Adriana Vasco-Kenneth's former receptionist and mistress of nine years-obliged by introducing him to ex-con Dennis Earl Godley. The deal was set. Godley would murder Carolyn for thirty-thousand dollars. On the day after her 44th birthday, the trusting victim was lured to a lonely stretch of road. The deadly rendezvous took a shocking turn. Not only was Carolyn gunned down with a .357 Magnum, but Kenneth would also be killed.The hit man's getaway driver was the other woman, Adriana Vasco. In a sensational trial, a tangled web of lies, sex, and betrayal unfolded as Adriana and Dennis turned against each other...