"Early this year, officials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art trussed up one of the prizes of its collection, an ancient vase known as the Euphronios krater, and sent it back to Italy. Italian authorities had presented evidence that the piece had been looted from a tomb near Rome less than a year before the Met paid $1 million for it in 1972. Faced with the prospect of a lawsuit and a ban on receiving any future loans from Italian museums, the Met, writes former Washington Post and New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, 'stalled, stonewalled, and would not be swayed—until it was forced to do so.' Seeing great institutions humbled like this might give satisfaction to some, but what is served by such returns of art? If they're meant as a statement against looting, how does shifting a pot from New York to Rome advance that interest? These are the underlying questions of Waxman's absorbing and well-researched Loot . . . Waxman recounts the story of Lord Elgin and his marbles and exposes lesser known but egregious cases of 19th-century pillage, such as the removal of three heads from a mural depicting the life of Egyptian pharaoh Amenophis III. Someone simply cut them from an out-of-the-way tomb in the Valley of the Kings; blank squares now indicate where the pharaoh's visages once appeared. 'It is shocking. Imagine the Mona Lisa's face cut out of her canvas with a kitchen knife,' writes Waxman, who was led to the scene by a guide with a flashlight. The faces are now in the Louvre, labeled simply, 'From the tomb of Amenophis III' with no explanation of their pillaged past. Waxman wants the Louvre and other museums to be more upfront with the public about the unethical or illegal origin of their treasures, even if they don't return them. Pillaged artifacts become part of the landscape in their adopted country, and not always in a good way. She offers an engrossing history of the removal of ancient Egyptian obelisks to cities all over Europe, where they were erected as imperial trophies in traffic circles and plazas, including St. Peter's Square in Rome."—Roger Atwood, The Washington Post Book World

"In Loot, Sharon Waxman, formerly of the New York Times, investigates the Lydian heist as well as similar curatorial debacles around the world. On separate floors of Cairo's Egyptian Museum, she reports, two research teams feuding over trivial logistical matters simultaneously catalog the museum's rich collection of artifacts, each using its own distinct, incompatible notation system. Waxman stops by the then uncompleted museum at the base of the Acropolis--which is meant to house the Elgin Marbles one day, should the British Museum ever return them—where local protests and managerial incompetence delayed construction for years. But Waxman appears to believe that, despite everything, these countries have some legitimate claim to the antiquities that have been taken through various semilegal and extralegal contrivances throughout the ages. And she is honest—often angrily so--about the ambiguous circumstances under which many of these objects left their homes. One of the best passages in Loot is a tour of the Louvre's cluttered, poorly labeled antiquities galleries, with Waxman supplementing the stingily worded display cards to create a panoramic exposition of French misadventures in Egypt. Visiting the Chamber of Kings, for example, where a three-wall bas-relief mural tells the story of eleven centuries of Egyptian royal history, Waxman corrects the Louvre's cursory explanation—'elements' were 'lost in transport'—with a story of breathtaking greed and fraud: in the 1840s, a French explorer paid a midnight visit to a temple in Karnak, pried out the mural and bribed a local governor to allow him to ship it, in pieces, to Paris, where well-meaning workers coated the reliefs with a layer of varnish that soaked away the 3,500-year-old paint below, leaving the mural almost colorless. This section of Loot, as well as similar ones on the Met and the British Museum,