The Art Thief by Michael Finkel

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession. Finkel tells the story of Stéphane Breitwieser, who carried out more than 200 art heists across Europe over a 10-year-period. He stole, usually with the help of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, more than three hundred works of art, worth an estimated $2B. 

Singular in the world of art thieves, Breitwieser stole not to then sell the pieces, but rather to just keep and look at them. He displayed the work where he lived with Kleinklaus, in the attic of his mother's house. 

It is interesting reading of the audaciousness of many of the heists and Breitwieser's self-professed love of art is at first somewhat endearing, but his view of himself as a liberator of art is impossible to reconcile with what eventually happens to the pieces. It felt inevitable that things would end poorly, regardless of whether Breitwieser expected or intended them to, making him come across less as sympathetic and more as someone who caused great harm.

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel was an interesting book and eminently fast read about Christopher Knight, who spent 27 years living in the Maine wilderness with only two instances of contact with other people.

Finkel wrote of how Knight grew up in Maine as part of a family that largely kept to themselves and told Finkel he hadn't fled any bad situation or harbored ill will towards anyone, but just left society. He in 1986 went on a solo road trip to Florida at twenty-years-old, then drove back to Maine, went past his house, left his car with an almost empty gas tank, and walked into the woods. Knight recounted to the author how a few weeks in, he spent one night in an unoccupied cabin, then never slept indoors again, and established camp less than 30 miles from his childhood home.

Knight was in a heavily forested area near North Pond lake and accessed his living room sized camp by slipping between large boulders, and survived by pilfering food and other supplies from nearby camps and unoccupied cabins. He said that during the almost three decades there he never lit a fire so as to avoid detection, and wouldn't leave for five or six months during the winter. Everything in Knight’s camp was stolen, including the mattress on box springs and metal bed frame and while there, he would read books, listen to a radio, and just do nothing. In frigid winter stretches he would go to sleep at 7:30, then wake at 2:00 so that he could get his blood flowing and not be asleep for the coldest part of the night.

Finkel wrote a bit about hermits and those that have lived apart from society and notes that Knight is perhaps the most solitary known person in all of human history. To this point, it’s stated in the book that Knight recounted how it was solitude he sought, and never felt alone, and his two interactions with other people were a shared hello with a passing hiker in the 1990s, and then two months before his time in the woods ended, stepping out of his camp upon hearing three people hiking just outside the entrance. The hikers later said that they knew they had come across the fabled hermit and thief, but felt he should be left alone, told Knight they wouldn’t report him, and didn’t come forward until after Knight was no longer in the woods.

Knight almost certainly would have remained in the camp and continued his lifestyle and practice of stealing what he needed, but was in April 2013 arrested while taking supplies from a summer camp. The Maine game warden who caught him and state trooper who took him in later noted that they believed his story and felt very sympathetic. Knight entered the Maine court system and was treated with leniency, with him pleading guilty to 13 counts of burglary, and not receiving any jail time. He went to live with his elderly mother, whom he noted as not contacting while in the woods to tell her he safe because of his shame about being a hermit and thief, and had to for a period of time either hold a job or go to school and report to a case manager, and appear in court monthly.

Finkel wrote a good book, but wraps it up on kind of a melancholy note about Knight becoming compliant and no longer defiant about his life, with him forced back into a society he left behind, and didn’t seem comfortable at all reentering.

Writing on interacting with the world - by Brand, Jones, Finkel & Breznican

There's a few different pieces of great writing I've seen recently that grouped together for me under the subject of how people interact with the world.

The first two pieces to note were profound and well-written essays, one by Russell Brand for The Guardian and one by Chris Jones for Esquire. The Brand piece was "Robin Williams’ divine madness will no longer disrupt the sadness of the world" after Williams' suicide and was great writing remiscent of the piece "For Amy" that Brand wrote after the passing of Amy Winehouse in 2007. The piece from Jones was "Some Days You Just Want to Kill Yourself" from a 2011 issue of Esquire and posted online earlier this month after the death of Williams. It's a highly personal piece about depression and one I wrote a pretty lengthy post on after first reading.

The other two pieces of great writing to mention here weren't about depression, but covered well people leading theirs lives in a fascinating manner. For GQ Magazine was the Michael Finkel piece "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit" on Christopher Knight, who spent close to 30 years by himself in the woods of Maine off supplies he pilfered. Knight's story is a tremendously interesting one and Finkel wrote the piece with himself in it as someone who visited Knight in prison. This first-person approach definitely worked in the story and was made even more interesting with Finkel's own back-story as a journalist fired for creating a composite character, and Finkel then having his identity assumed by a murderer. It's a remarkable tale that Finkel wrote of in the 2006 book True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa that's the basis of an already filmed movie starring Jonah Hill and James Franco.

The last piece to note on someone with a unique approach to life, or at a minimum to his career, was "Zen and the art of casting Bill Murray in your movie" by Anthony Breznican for Entertainment Weekly. Really an entertaining look at the famously difficult to get reach and get attention from comedic genius.

Outside Magazine Pieces by Bruce Barcott and Tom Vanderbilt & Nat Geo story by Michael Finkel

There were two piece of writing that stood out from the September issue of Outside Magazine... with one of them finally now posted online with the October issue having been published.

Larger of the two stories was "The Devil on Paradise Road" by Bruce Barcott and it featured the heading "It started as a bluebird New Year's Day in Mount Rainier National Park. But when a gunman murdered a ranger and then fled back into the park's frozen backcountry, every climber, skier, and camper became a suspect—and a potential victim." Extremely captivating writing reminiscent of the Bob Friel story "The Vanishing" from Outside earlier this year.

The other piece from this Sept edition of outside was also solid writing, but first caught my attention more for the writer himself than the subject. Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent surprise bestseller, Traffic (which I reviewed back in 2008) wrote "Born in the USA" on the business trend towards manufacturing being done in the U.S., otherwise known as insourcing.

Not from Outside, but on the same type of "living different than most" topic Outside frequently writes on was another piece of really good writing to note here. For the August issue of National Geographic, Michael Finkel did "Tibet’s Golden 'Worm'" on the caterpillar fungus known as yartsa (or "worms") found only in the high mountains of Tibet and sought after in Asian cultures for it's supposed healing qualities. Terribly interesting subject described well by Finkel.