the Nazi looting of Europe's libraries and the race to return a literary inheritance
"While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. ... Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books. When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe's libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. ... But when the war was over, most of the books were never returned. ... Now Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes, setting out to return it to its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun the monumental task of combing through Berlin's public libraries to identify the looted books and reunite them with the families of their original owners. ... And as Rydell travels to return the volume he was given, he shows just how much a single book can mean to those who own it"--Amazon.com.
