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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In 1717, Prussian emperor Frederick I presented Peter the Great
with a remarkable treasure: enough wall-sized panels covered with meticulously carved amber to decorate an entire room.
Eventually installed in a palace near St. Petersburg, the Amber Room was stolen by the Nazis during the 1941 siege of Leningrad and
hidden in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad)-after which little is certain. Levy and Scott-Clark (The Stone of Heaven) devote as much space to their
efforts to sift through the sparse evidence as to their reconstructions,
and though the story line is a bit muddled early on, when they also try to
squeeze in the room's history, they eventually find a comfortable balance.
Digging through files from former Soviet museums and the East German
secret police, they retrace previous investigations and slowly realize
just how valuable the missing room was to the Soviets as Cold War
propaganda. Even after the collapse of communism, its potential recovery
continues to stoke the flames of Russians' memories of the Great Patriotic
War, and the probe raises important (though unfortunately unanswered)
questions about the Red Army's activities as the war wound down in Europe.
The pair of investigative journalists never quite manages to distract
readers from the inevitable failure of their search, so the probable fate
of the room, when finally broached, may strike some as anticlimactic.
However, the authors do offer an intriguing peek at the inner workings of
Soviet bloc espionage-along with a detour into the avariciousness of some
contemporary Russians. 50 b&w images, 3 maps. Copyright © Reed
Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Free Copy Shurelly, today it's the most interesting popular "scientific" edition on this topic.
However I can't agree with stated point of view. I think that it shows only one version from lots of possible.
We can confidently say that there are some facts proving the Amber Room existance. Probably in private closed collection or lying on the bottom of the sea. |
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