He is the author of 13 books, and the recipient of the 2013 Orion Book Award, the 2007, 2012, and 2018, Sigurd F. Finders Keepers is also a personal and vulnerable story as Childs confesses his own errors and missteps along the way.Īccording to his website, Childs lives off the grid outside Norwood, a town of with fewer than 600 people in western Colorado.
Through engaging storytelling, Childs asks the reader to contemplate sacred spaces and how removing artifacts whether to put them in a museum or in the hands of a private collector desecrates them.
How should we respect the burial grounds, the remains-the tools, and beads, and vessels left behind-and the cultural heritage of people who have long since passed. While Finders Keepers is a book about archeology on one level, it is also a philosophical book about ethics. There is something about the human spirit that wants to possess things, even things that aren’t necessarily ours to have. The idea is that you will want to buy a souvenir, a trinket, something to remind you of your time at the museum, even if it is just a postcard or a refrigerator magnet. In fact, at some museums, you exit through the gift shop. As a soldier, prosecutor, and classics scholar, Bogdanos was the right person for the hunt, and his book reads like a tension-filled mystery crime thriller. Interestingly there is a huge market for antiquities, and curiously art, drugs, and arms often travel together in the international black-market. 11.Īrmed with a classics degree from Bucknell University, a law degree and a master’s degree in classics from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the Army War College, Bogdanos found himself in Bagdad and assigned to recover stolen antiquities that had been looted from the Iraq National Museum during the battle of Baghdad. He had prosecuted some heinous crimes in New York before being recalled to active duty following the attacks on the U.S. Bogdanos was a New York City Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan. I had been to a talk by Matthew Bogdanos, author of Thieves of Bagdad. All month there are activities, lectures, and discussion built around this book.Īs soon as I started reading, I was reminded of another book I had read about 15 years ago. It is a journey that explores the moral ground of archeology, and it asks tough questions-who owns or has the right to what has been left behind?įinders Keepers, A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession is the 2023 One Book One Valley selection of the Estes Valley Library. He draws you in and takes you along on a journey that uncovers more than ancient artifacts. And I love a book that tells a good story.Ĭolorado author Craig Childs checks all of those boxes.
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