As is so often the case, the movie added exciting but completely fictional events to the events of the book. In some ways, this might have been the right thing to do. For instance, even with the added action, my boyfriend who had not read the book found the movie a bit slow. However, I think these men deserve to be remembered and I think fictionalizing their story defeats the purpose of telling it to begin with. I found the fictionalized crush the one women had on one of the men in the movie particularly offensive because I think she seems less admirable as a result. I also disliked that exciting events were made up. There were instances in the book, such as one of the monuments men being mistaken for a spy that could have been humorously elaborated on instead of making things up from scratch. For all my complaints, I think this was a well made if slightly slow movie. It just doesn’t stand up well to a comparison with the wonderful book!

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I’m constantly intrigued by the many amazing true stories from the WWII period and this is another good one. The Monuments Men were a group of mostly older men from artistic careers who volunteered to go to Europe to protect monuments during the Allied offensive. They also became involved in retrieving and returning the many valuable art works stolen by German forces. As the war turned against them, German commanders were ordered to destroy art rather than let it be recaptured. Meanwhile, Russian troops claimed any art work they found as the spoils of war. Limited support left the Monuments Men trying to accomplish miracles, rescuing art as quickly as possible.

I enjoyed this book from the very beginning. The author starts with notes about sources and an explanation of how dialog in the book was crafted from primary sources. I love knowing exactly where the information I’m reading comes from, so I really appreciate books with a section like this. The author also includes small biographies with pictures of each of the major players in the story. This was incredibly helpful throughout the book. Something I’m sure it’s hard to do is to help the reader connect with the large number of people involved in a project like this. The biographies gave me something to refer back to each time a character was mentioned. That helped me keep track of everyone enough to have a connection with each of the characters. I think that was critical to my enjoyment of this book.

The book also included some personal stories about each of the men (and the one woman) involved. These were perfectly balanced with sections describing the art and sections describing the action. The author also did a great job integrating the story of the Monuments Men into the overall story of the war. There were descriptions of some of the major battles which I’d heard about before, but there were also more new-to-me descriptions of the time leading up to the war, the experience at the homefront, and the ending of the war in Germany. Although the descriptions of battles made me think deeply about whether the Monuments Men’s choice to risk their life for art made sense, the author does clearly articulate the reasons they thought this choice was worthwhile. The author did a great job telling their story in an engaging way and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in WWII or art history.

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I think objectively this book is very well done. The author includes a lot of very detailed statistics but mixes them in with fun facts, first-hand anecdotes, and fascinating stories. However, for me, this was just more detail than I needed on the topic. I felt the story got bogged down by details of exact numbers and dates. There were a number of people mentioned, but I couldn’t keep them straight because we were never given any personal information about any them and they all blurred together. The timeline was hard to follow because (at least in my ARC) dates usually didn’t include the year and in chapters that spanned multiple years, this could be confusing. I think had I finished this, I’d have given it three stars because I didn’t enjoy it, but I think someone very interested in the topic would. I made it through about a third of the book before deciding that it just wasn’t for me.

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This week is the last week of The Monuments Men read-along I’m co-hosting with Jennifer at Bookalicious Mama. If you’ve been reading along or have already finished the book and would like to join in, you can leave your answers to the discussion questions or a link to a post with your answers in the comments below.

1. If you were in Germany at the end of the war, do you think you would visit the liberated concentration camps to bear witness like Eisenhower or avoid them to avoid hating the German people like monuments man Hancock?
2. What do you think of this statement from page 332, beginning of chapter 43, about Adolf Hitler – “perhaps the one thing that made hum human and therefore truly terrifying – was his love of art”?
3. How did you like the book? Is there anything you particularly loved or hated about it?

Thank everyone for joining us in this fun read-along! I really enjoyed the book and am excited for more book-to-movie read-a-longs in the future. If you’re looking for another read-along, be sure to check out the Divergent read-along Jennifer is hosting next month. The first discussion isn’t until February 10th, so there’s still plenty of time to get the book.

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1) Hitler wanted to gain ownership of art in order to place it in the Third Reich’s museums —ones that already existed, and then in the Führermuseum that he planned on building in his hometown of Linz, Austria. Why did he want art that was from all over Europe? Why did he think that appropriating art from other people and countries would glorify the Third Reich?
I think in lot of cases he felt Germany had a right to art from other countries, because it was from countries he blamed for Germany’s economic situation. Despite being a horrible person, it also seems as though he simply had an appreciation for the value of art. Property rights, not so much.

2) Who owns art? Why is art important to the culture in which it is created?
The artist and then who ever they give or sell it to. Although art is valuable to society, I don’t believe that artists have an obligation to exhibit their work. Art is important because it can cultivate a national identity and sense of pride in your country. It’s also often a valuable record of a country’s history.

3) The Monuments Men’s directive was to preserve cultural properties in war zones, provided that they did not interfere with any military operations. At what points did these two directives conflict with each other, and how was that handled?
If protecting art could cost lives, the soldiers’ lives came first with the exception of a few volunteers, mostly the monuments men. In cases where the protection of art simply required some discomfort or inconvenience, protection of the art typically came first.

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Sex and the Founding Fathers does not directly deal with sex and the founding fathers, as you might expect. Instead the author examines how people have remembered the founding fathers and their sex lives throughout history. He argues that how we view the founding fathers says something about our values. We like to imagine that the founding fathers were paragons of virtue. How we remember them shows what we think an ideal American should be like.

I was quite excited to start this book. However, the book I expected was actually about the founding fathers, with commentary on their biographies on the side. I also expected some good narrative non-fiction from the parts describing the founding fathers. This book met neither of those expectations. Instead of talking directly about the founding fathers, the author only describes them through the medium of other biographies. At times, this degenerated into lists of quotes from other biographies, which could get quite dry. The organization was a bit iffy as well. Organizing by topic was a wise choice, but the author didn’t always stay on topic. He   repeated himself quite a bit, both between topics and between founding fathers.

Despite the dry tone and disorienting organization, I still could have liked this book if the topic was handled well. However, the author is constantly making sweeping assertions about the type of biographies published at different times. He only supports these assertions with cherry picked examples. If he wants to make broad claims, he needs to support them with numbers. For instance, he claims that more biographies considered the possibility Washington was infertile once infertility became a prevalent social problem. In that case, a greater percentage of published biographies should begin to include that possibility. Just sharing a few examples of such biographies tells me nothing. Alternately, the author could have added scholarly acumen to his book by sharing the truth of the founding father’s lives, instead of just sharing what previous biographers have claimed. In the absence of any scholarly contribution, it’s hard to overlook the fact that this just wasn’t an entertaining read. I had high hopes for this book going in, but I find myself unable to recommend it.

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Currently in Japan regular employment is becoming scarcer, the population is aging, and recovery from the nuclear disaster of 3/11 is still underway. All of these factors have made life more uncertain in Japan. Many people feel a lack of belonging and connection to other people. The author, Anne Allison, addresses these issues both through social theories about Japan and her extensive interviews with Japanese citizens.

This is one of those books that is a three star book because there were four star bits and two star bits. I loved when the author shared interviews with individuals, her personal experiences, and news stories. I also enjoyed learning about the history of Japan and how it impacts the way people feel now. The theories the author had about current events were fascinating, as were her tentative suggestions for ways the Japanese might recover a feeling of security. Despite being full of facts and clearly well researched, parts of this book were very profound and emotionally moving.

The only bad bits were places where the language got too dense for me to follow. There were some bits where I would google word definitions (because not all of them were in my kindle dictionary) and re-read a sentence several times without ever feeling like I really understood what they were saying. Sometimes I felt like it was some academic just trying to sound smart without saying much, but I think it’s more likely that these words have different meanings within the field of sociology. This happened the most when the author was integrating ideas from other scholars. It was almost as though there was a dissertation mixed in with my narrative non-fiction.

Overall, this was a good book and I think there were far more interesting, understandable bits than bits that were hard to follow. If, like me, you’d like to know more about different cultures and current events, I’d recommend giving this a try. The published version might even add some clarification at which point I would highly recommend it.

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Writing on the Wall is about all of the ingenious and fascinating ways that information has been transmitted over the centuries. The author is able to draw surprising parallels between ancient media and the social media of today. These comparisons inform discussions of issues still relevant today, such as the question of whether communication at a distance makes us feel more or less connected to other people, and raises the question of how we’ll choose to use social media in the future.

Writing on the Wall is very well organized, moving forward chronologically with each chapter devoted to an era dominated by a particular form of communication. These focused chapters allowed the author to share a ton of fascinating details about each era. For those of us who love fun facts, this is perfect. In addition to being enjoyable for their own sake, these little details really brought each era to life for me. For instance, did you know that lower class Romans often communicated via graffiti? And, thanks to the preservation of Pompeii, the author is able to actually share bits of that graffiti! I was amazed at how similar that graffiti was to things people might write today. For me, that feeling of “wow, they were just like us” is one of the best ways to bring history to life.

The title of that chapter on graffiti in Pompeii? “Gnaeus Alleius Wrote on Your Wall.” Although these silly, fun, explicit comparisons to social media of today could have been too much, I enjoyed them a lot. They each made me smile and enhanced that feeling of being connected to the past. However, more even than just being enjoyable and amusing, these comparisons to the past gave the author a way to talk about issues raised by social media that are still relevant today. I particularly enjoyed the direct quotes from luminaries such as Thomas Paine and Cicero on social media in their time. This combination of fun facts and insightful ideas made for an interesting and thought provoking read.

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The publication of the Pentagon Papers, top secret documents leaked to a reporter, was contentious from the beginning. First, there was internal debate at The New York Times over whether or not to publish. Then publication led to one of the most important first amendment cases ever, as the government sought an injunction to keep The Times from continuing to publish more of the Pentagon Papers. As the chief legal counsel for The Times, James Goodale is able to share his first hand experience  and his thoughts on the personalities involved in this momentous historical case.

Although Fighting for the Press was occasionally hard to follow or a little repetitive as the case moved through the appeals process, it was mostly just exciting. And if James Goodale occasionally seemed a little too self-congratulatory, I can’t blame him too much given the role he played in winning this famous first amendment victory. Overall, the story was very well written. Precise language was used to explain legal concepts so clearly that they were extremely exciting even to someone with my lack of prior knowledge.

From the beginning, I felt as though I’d been given a priceless opportunity to interview someone who’d lived through a pivotal moment in our nation’s history. In many cases, I like for a non-fiction author to be unbiased, but this was clearly a memoir as well as a history. As such, the author’s personal recollections and impressions of the people involved in the case added some depth and intrigue to what could otherwise have been a dry legal story. There were actually moments when, despite knowing the final outcome, I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see how the details played out. This was an engaging read that I’d recommend to fans of history books and memoirs.

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This “biography of cancer” starts with the first documented cases of cancer, continues through initial attempts at cures, and finishes with descriptions of the most recent discoveries. Intertwined with the historical narrative are the stories of the author’s patients, giving us just a glimpse of what it’s like to live with cancer.

For all of The Emperor of Maladies popular acclaim, this is not a book I would describe as “pop science”. That’s not to say that the science was hard to understand, just that it wasn’t simplified. So often, science books rely on analogies to convey the gist of a scientific concept, but gloss over the details. Mukherjee doesn’t compromise on the details. Instead he takes the time to explain, clearly and simply, the scientific concepts the reader needs to understand. He writes beautifully and elegantly. He uses large words naturally and precisely, never coming across as trying to hard. And while his scientifically precise choice of words is clear in the appropriate sections, his word choice in the personal stories clearly conveys his empathy and respect for his patients.

This first thing several people asked me when I said I was reading a book on cancer was “isn’t that depressing?”. Fortunately, no. Of course there were research setbacks and not every patient survives. Each of these tragedies were deeply moving. The author makes you feel very strongly the hopes and disappointments of patients, doctors, and scientists. Overall, however, this is a story of progress. A story of the amazing ways in which scientists have built on the successes of those that come before them. A story which has moved on from the early expectation that we will easily defeat cancer, but still a story that ended not with depression but with hope. Highly recommended.

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