国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語(yǔ)Fran?ais
Culture
Home / Culture / Books

The art of the sleuth

By Mei Jia | China Daily | Updated: 2013-07-02 11:15

The art of the sleuth

Former FBI agent Robert King Wittman visits the country to promote the Chinese edition of his memoir. Photos Provided to China Daily

The art of the sleuth

Former FBI investigator Robert King Wittman has written a book about his career tracking down the world's top art thieves. Mei Jia reports on a world of gangsters, intrigue and very valuable artworks.

Former art crime investigator Robert King Wittman still remembers the time he retrieved the world's second largest crystal ball, which once belonged to Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The crystal ball, weighing 22.5 kg, was found in a young woman's bedroom in New Jersey in the United States, one year after it was stolen from a Philadelphia museum.

"The once-gorgeous exhibit was there on a dresser with a baseball cap on it," Wittman says. "She used the cap to shield it from the sunlight in case it acted as a conduit to start a fire."

During his 20 years with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wittman went undercover to mingle with gangsters and the mafia, and rescued stolen artworks and antiques worth more than $300 million in total.

The list of recovered artworks includes the Auguste Rodin sculpture that inspired the Impressionist movement, Pearl Buck's manuscripts of the Pulitzer-winning The Good Earth, the original manuscript of United States Bill of Rights and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn's small 1630 Self-Portrait valued at $36 million.

Wittman recounts the stories behind these recoveries in his memoir, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. The book is written in a readable, entertaining style to alert the public to the importance of preserving cultural heritage.

"Once you lose it, basically, it's gone. Then you lose your history. And if you don't know where you came from, you'll repeat the mistakes," the former agent says.

The book was praised in The Washington Post, which wrote: "Almost every case he recounts has enough intrigue and suspense for a Hollywood screenplay."

The book has been released in Chinese by Hangzhou-based MatrixBook.

Wittman chronologically retells 15 stories from his career, "like a true crime story, weaving in a bit of history", he says.

Wittman wrote most of the book from memory, checking court records, media files and other sources to verify the details.

Born in 1955 in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and American father, Wittman's family moved to the US in 1958. Because of a lack of knowledge about Asian countries at that time, his mother was a victim of racial prejudice.

Related:

Tricks of the trade

After reading former FBI agent Robert King Wittman's book about tracking down art thieves, screenwriter and critic Shi Hang says Wittman is a real-life Indiana Jones. More

Q & A with the investigator

Previous 1 2 Next

Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
临汾市| 上杭县| 罗甸县| 镶黄旗| 合肥市| 德清县| 临朐县| 咸宁市| 确山县| 衡东县| 焦作市| 永新县| 龙泉市| 定襄县| 海晏县| 安龙县| 张家界市| 汉寿县| 蓝山县| 修水县| 泉州市| 卢湾区| 临汾市| 扶风县| 禹州市| 鄂伦春自治旗| 长乐市| 巩留县| 城口县| 灯塔市| 化隆| 綦江县| 台安县| 台江县| 都昌县| 霸州市| 易门县| 集贤县| 威远县| 苏尼特右旗| 那曲县|