Book of the year: The Rescue Artist

To be more precise, it's my book of 2009. It was not the best book I read last year but I spent almost the whole year to finish it! The subject itself is very interesting: it's about the theft of the famous modern painting "The Scream" Still, to fill up a whole book, the author had to pull in a lot of related and not-quite-related stories. The ones about the personalities/anecdotes of the detective who recovered it could get boring some times. On the other hand, the ones about other famous paintings that have been stolen before were mostly interesting. For example, I learned about Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by its worker named Vincenzo. The theft itself was not as interesting as the scam related to it! Allegedly, an Argentinean con artist named Eduardo de Valfierno convinced Vincenzo to steal the Mona Lisa. According to Wikipedia, Valfierno commissioned the French art forger Yves Chaudron to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original! He actually made more money by doing this than selling the stolen piece. If you are interested in other famoust art theft, check out this link. Of course, you could also read this book :P

I just dug out my original post that I wrote when I bought the book a year ago. It's the 2nd and also the last book I bought from Stacey's. Can't believe this iconic bookstore has been closed for about a year! It will be missed.