Did you know that the Nazis looted books from all over Europe? I didn't either, which was why I decided to pick this book up. I wanted to read about why and how the Nazis went about looting books from various libraries, as well as the long-lasting impact on the population. The problem with this book, however, is that it front loads all the information you want to know in the first two chapters.

The following chapters are almost academic and highly detailed accounts of how each library was looted by the Nazis before and during WWII. Every chapter follows a similar structure: author visits a library, meets with a librarian, the librarian shares some of the books that they carry now, where those books came from, rinse and repeat. The author also goes to great lengths, and I mean GREAT lengths, to document the history around the library, the book collection, who was responsible for looting that particular library, which organisation he came from, what purposes were behind the looting, how he went about doing it, what Hitler thought about it, which librarians were in charge, etc. Halfway through the book and it all gets super tedious and repetitive. We are told that a tome about the history of Jews is supposed to be priceless and highly coveted by the Nazis. But because of the way these information are served up, it feels next to inconsequential. Look, if you tell me that everything is important, then nothing is. Plain and simple.

I was also hoping for a human side to the stories. Instead, we hear a lot of books but no owners. We hear a lot of Nazi leaders, but no victims. Instead of humanising this particular piece of history, which is little known to most, we are presented a record of all the important books that were stolen, but not whom the books were stolen from. Yes, they were stolen from the Freemasons, the Jews, the French, the Russians, etc — but who were they? Did they have names? What did the books mean to them? We get none of that information, which does make the tedium not worth the effort at all.