/h/lit

nuclearshill gau/cho 9mo ago (image post) Edited 9mo ago 252 thread views #246454

Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #40

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

I'm still reading “The R*pe of Europa”, a book about nazi plunder of European art.

The R*pe of Europa delves a lot into Göring and Hitler schemes to collect art. Hitler's collection was organized for his future “Führermuseum” in Linz, but in practice it was basically his own private collection. Göring had his own agents and dealers working to acquire art across occupied Europe (mostly through confiscated property, museum looting or forced acquisitions where the owner couldn't simply turn down the nazi's offers too many times) and they did what they could to get the best pieces before Hans Posse who reported directly to Hitler, as once Posse determined a certain piece was destined to Linz it was completely out of reach.

!bookworms !classics

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Allende trussy/rate 9mo ago #5955125

!historychads (cause I saw someone else ping and that seemed like a good idea)

I finally finished The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly. I liked it...?

There were very interesting parts but Kelly's writing style seemed all over the place. Lots of jumping around among people, introducing someone just to have them assassinated and you wonder why he spent the time to introduce this minor Irish priest or landlord when just giving details about the assassination, or saying assassinations picked up, would have been just as effective. I wish he had spent more time on the British political leaders and soup kitchen stuff. He also goes on a bit about the Irish emigres and their experience and growth in America with a weird bit about Tammeny hall. The section was interesting but entirely disjointed from the rest of the narrative history and not long enough to really be an in depth telling of the Irish immigrant community. The talking about processing into the new world was way more connected and made sense, just the political and New York centric part didn't.

But I liked it well enough that I am now reading his book on the Black Death. We'll see if I stick it out. The potato famine book took me a month and a half to get through due to length and constantly needing to re read bits to try and understand where he was going with it. But I love the black death more than I love Irish people and might have an easier time.