The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and the World's Biggest Art Heist
Few non-fiction books manage to be both a gripping thriller and a serious reckoning with historical injustice, but Matthew Campbell's account of one of history's most audacious cultural thefts is exactly that. It's the kind of book that keeps you reading well past the point you intended to stop. In the chaotic wake of Cambodia's civil war, ancient temples that had survived for centuries were systematically stripped bare. Sacred sculptures were wrenched from their plinths, towering Hindu deities disappeared, and priceless artefacts of the Khmer Empire found their way into private hands. At the heart of it all was Douglas Latchford, a British expatriate whose decades-long fixation on Khmer art drove one of the most brazen acts of cultural plunder in living memory. Campbell traces the stolen objects from the jungle ruins of the Killing Fields era all the way to the marble-floored galleries of New York and London, and into the private collections of the extraordinarily wealthy. The journey is as morally complex as it is geographically vast. What does it mean to strip a nation of its sacred past? Who bears responsibility when beautiful objects pass through so many hands before reaching a museum wall? Years of investigative reporting and rare access to key figures, including temple looters, art traffickers, archaeologists, and the investigators working to bring these pieces home, give the book a lived-in authority. The research is thorough, the writing is assured, and the story it tells is genuinely troubling in the best possible way. Praise from Oliver Bullough (author of Moneyland) and Zeke Faux (author of Number Go Up) reflects the book's crossover appeal: part investigative journalism, part moral inquiry, entirely absorbing.
- Author: Matthew Campbell
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Journalism & Media Studies
- ISBN: 978-0241676004
- Pages: 415 pages