Will I love The Art Thief?

This book was totally nonfiction but read like a page-turning thriller. Amazing!

A nuanced, factual profile of an actual sociopath, Michae Frankel’s The Art Thief describes the extensive career and eventual capture of a brazen, remarkably successful thief, a man driven not by material greed but by a compulsive lust for possessing beautiful objects. Frankel’s well-researched, absorbing narrative exposes the vulnerability of civil society to the predations of a person impervious to law and incapable of envisioning anyone’s needs or interests but his own.

As a museum-goer also concerned about the current fragility of civil society, I read this true story as a cautionary parable for our times, a vital reminder that… show more.

As I finished each chapter of this book, I couldn’t wait to read the next one. Finkel’s book is a suspenseful and psychological dive into the world of a gentleman art thief.

The disappearance in this book? Billions of dollars in stolen art. The thief? Stéphane Breitwieser is a self-proclaimed art collector living in his mother's attic with his girlfriend and their treasure trove of stolen art. What compels him to steal? How does he get away with it? How does he eventually get caught? These are the questions that kept me reading! 

The Art Thief is a narrative exposition of the long and bizarre career of one of Europe’s most “successful” art thieves (200 liftings over a decade, across Europe, valued at $2 billion); someone who stole not for profit, but out of a desire to be in the constant presence of incomparable beauty (and, clearly, had an addiction). 

Some reviewers quibbled with the fact that Finkel’s is not the first book on the subject (who cares?), relied on speculative psychological analysis, etc. but as someone unfamiliar with the story, I found the book very entertaining, and read it in one sitting.