Karolyn Shindler

This sounded like an interesting book when I read the description online, but it's really a chronological day-by-day "diary" of events at the museum during WWI, with each day's entry consisting of a few sentences or paragraphs and relatively small and uninteresting B&W photos (the book is also rather small, about the size of a paperback). I think this would have been a far better book if organized around the stories and people rather than as a pseudo-diary. And more photos of the museum during the war would have been nice.

That being said, it does offer a unique view of what life was like in England at the time, with its misogyny, intense pressure on every man to enlist to be slaughtered at the front, etc. So from that perspective it is fascinating (it just takes a number of pages before all that becomes clear).… (mehr)