Ilaria Dagnini Brey

Last year I read "The Monuments Men", a book about how the Allied military protected and/or recovered artwork from the Nazi's during/after WWII. Although I enjoyed it, at that time I felt it was so overwhelming covering all aspects of the war throughout Europe, and I kept getting "lost". I wondered if it would have been better had it been more focused. "The Venus Fixers" appeared to be the answer, narrowing its focus almost exclusively on activity in Italy

Guess what....I was wrong. "The Venus Fixers" became tedious and repetitive covering details insignificant to the big picture of what was going on.

In short, I could not wait for the book to end. The author seemed to have almost an agenda to make most of the military look bad, highlighting minute, inconsequential events and outlining more mistakes than successes. The tighter focus of the book should have made the flow simpler, instead, the author seemed to purposely jump around from location to location, artist to artist, military event to event, so it became more convoluted than "The Monuments Men".

This books is one of my bigger disappointments for quite some time. Far better books have been written to cover this very interesting aspect of military involvement in WWII.… (meer)