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ericbuscemi 's review for:
I almost never read non-fiction, and even then, I never read historical non-fiction, so take my review with a grain of salt. I'm pretty sure I am adding a star just because I learned so much about WWII through this very specific lens of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives officers -- aka the Monuments Men.
I considered listing a few facts I learned while reading, but they make me sound so ignorant I couldn't bear to type them all out. One anecdotal light-bulb-went-off-in-my-head moment I will share -- when German officer Erwin Rommel was mentioned in passing, and I immediately said to myself, "that is why my uncle's German Shepherd was named Rommel!" Literally every person I mentioned this to afterward said something like this "Yeah, you didn't know who the Desert Fox was?" or "Yeah, he was the African tank commander that tried to assassinate Hitler."
One interesting thing I noticed about this kind of historical writing is that there is almost no dialogue, as every comment made by one of the Monuments Men comes straight from a source, mostly letters to loved ones back home and military correspondences. This was both a positive and a negative, as it gave me great faith in the historical accuracy of what I was reading, but made the text dry and detached at points.
I had decided to read this after seeing the movie trailer (I am a fanatic about reading the book before I see the movie), and will update further after I see it, though I will note now that I glanced at the film's IMDB page to see which actor was playing which character, only to find they are playing fictitious versions, not the actual men featured in the book.
I considered listing a few facts I learned while reading, but they make me sound so ignorant I couldn't bear to type them all out. One anecdotal light-bulb-went-off-in-my-head moment I will share -- when German officer Erwin Rommel was mentioned in passing, and I immediately said to myself, "that is why my uncle's German Shepherd was named Rommel!" Literally every person I mentioned this to afterward said something like this "Yeah, you didn't know who the Desert Fox was?" or "Yeah, he was the African tank commander that tried to assassinate Hitler."
One interesting thing I noticed about this kind of historical writing is that there is almost no dialogue, as every comment made by one of the Monuments Men comes straight from a source, mostly letters to loved ones back home and military correspondences. This was both a positive and a negative, as it gave me great faith in the historical accuracy of what I was reading, but made the text dry and detached at points.
I had decided to read this after seeing the movie trailer (I am a fanatic about reading the book before I see the movie), and will update further after I see it, though I will note now that I glanced at the film's IMDB page to see which actor was playing which character, only to find they are playing fictitious versions, not the actual men featured in the book.