In her evocative new book, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, Sharon Waxman travels to Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Italy to investigate the persistent tribulations of looting and restitution. Presenting more questions than answers, Loot reveals that there is no easy solution to the centuries – old problem of stolen antiquities.

Egypt, for example, wants the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, the Denderah zodiac from the Louvre and the bust of Nefertiti from the Altes Museum in Berlin. Western museums, on the other hand, argue that after hundreds of years, artifacts have a new cultural value in their current locations. Antiquities seen by the hundreds in mere hours in major museums would be seen by only hundreds annually in their source countries. And what about security and climate – control? Consider Turkey, which forced the Met to return the Lydian Hoard, only to have it stolen from a national museum without a functioning security system.

Throughout her journeys, Waxman traces the history of prestigious cultural icons, and how in the name of building collections, these antiquities arrived in renowned Western museums, including four of the worst offenders – so named for their rampant acquisition of looted artifacts and their refusal to disclose the real provenance of these items – the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The most intriguing areas of Loot are the accounts of and interviews with flashy government officials, journalists who have received death threats and sacrificed their families in the name of restitution, shady dealers and curators turned scapegoats. Among all the finger – pointing, Waxman hopes museum and government officials around the world can meet somewhere in the middle, cracking down on looting by only purchasing artifacts with a clear provenance and being honest about the history of looted artifacts when displaying them. As the battle continues, enlightened readers and art observers will be among the victors. Angela Leeper is an educational consultant and freelance writer in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Summer travels to great American cities frequently involve trips to those cities’ famous art museums, whether to enjoy the renowned art collections or simply to beat the heat. But as you soak up the art (and the air-conditioning), have you ever stopped to wonder how such European treasures as Italian Renaissance masterpieces, classic Impressionist works and iconic British portraits wound up in an art museum in, say, Boston, Philadelphia or New York City?
Old Masters, New World explores these questions in fascinating detail, delving into the early 20th-century’s Gilded Age and the wealthy industrialists who turned their American ingenuity (and their considerable fortunes) to acquiring some of the world’s most iconic works of art. Along the way, as they sought to rectify the lack of art and culture that had so disenchanted the critic Henry James, among others, with American life, these tycoons helped to establish collections – New York’s Frick Collection, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and, of course, the Metropolitan Museum of Art – that have remained cultural landmarks today.

Despite the beauty of these valuable masterpieces, often the methods of their attainment were anything but pretty – involving cut-throat competition, unscrupulous agents and dealers, and the kind of ruthless acquisitiveness that had already made American businessmen and industrialists the most powerful in the world. By focusing on individual collectors, collections and even on the often-fascinating stories of individual paintings, Saltzman brings this fast-paced, high-stakes world vividly to life.

Saltzman, who has degrees in both art history and business, is perhaps uniquely qualified to tell these stories, interspersing detailed descriptions of particular paintings with accounts of their purchase and acquisition. Appealing to history buffs, art lovers and biography fans Old Masters, New World will certainly give visitors to our country’s premier art museums something new to ponder.

Norah Piehl is a writer and editor who lives near Boston.

Margaret Timmers’ A Century of Olympic Posters, the image-filled companion volume to the Victoria ∧ Albert Museum exhibition, explores a variety of themes related to the Games. Originally published in the U.K., the book starts with modern Olympics founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin (careful to point out early English athletic competitions, as well) and ends with a sampling of posters for the 2008, 2010 and 2012 Games.

Timmers gives an overview of each Olympiad, including brief mentions of star athletes, sports or ceremonial elements making their debut, and technologies employed for the first time. She shows the influence of politics and world events on IOC decisions regarding banishment, and withholding/withdrawal of hosting honors.

She also makes astute observations about the realities of staging the increasingly monumental events, from ensuing debt (as far back as the 1920s) to the lasting transformation of a city (Barcelona is a prime example, she says).

But, of course the posters are the real subjects of this book and they are discussed in great detail, from designers and print runs, to trends and movements. Posters from the 1920s and ’30s draw heavily from rail travel posters of the day; later, artists like David Hockney and Jacob Lawrence brought their signature styles to designs for the Munich Games of 1972.

The striking posters from the U.S.-boycotted 1980 Moscow Games bear similarities to a poster heralding the 1948 London Games; while a spirited emblem evoking a leaping figure gives a colorful 1992 Barcelona poster a light, joyful look.

Photography lent a cinematic effect to posters for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which also featured Yusaku Kamekura’s simple, yet powerful logo combining the red rising sun from Japan’s flag with the Olympic rings rendered in gold. The five interlocking rings – all in one color or in the traditional blue, yellow, black, green and red – are without a doubt the most familiar symbol of the Olympics and have been incorporated into Olympic posters since the Stockholm Games of 1912, Timmers says.

Throughout A Century of Olympic Posters, Timmers draws connections between national identity, the Olympic ideal of international participation and the need to announce each specific Olympiad. This comprehensive survey scores a perfect 10.