Chasing Aphrodite

The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum

by Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2011, [First Edition], b/w plates, hardcover, dustjacket, ISBN 9780151015016

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, small black ink dot at top fore-edge (doesn't effect pages), small dent to bottom edge, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear (see photographs)

'A wealthy recluse founder, a cagey Italian art thief, a playboy curator, a narcissist CEO - the outlandish characters and bad behaviour could come straight from the pages of a thriller.  But the scandal of looted antiquities at the wealthy Getty Museum is all too real, as are its chilling effects on the rest of the art world.
Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino were the first to report on the revelations that the Getty had bought looted antiquities for decades.  Now, drawing on a trove of confidential records and frank interviews, they give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the Getty's dealings in the illegal antiquities trade, revealing the inner workings of one world-class museum and tracing the reverberations of the scandal on others - many of which have given up their finest pieces of classical art as a result of the upheaval, returning antiquities worth over half a million dollars to the governments of Italy and Greece.
Past-paced and compelling, Chasing Aphrodite exposes the layer of dirt beneath the polished façade of the museum business.'