Myles J. Connor Jr. is an arts connoisseur with a penchant for Japanese swords and Rembrandt.
He is also a thief. Since the mid-’60s, Connor has pilfered works from numerous cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Children’s Museum. He’s been a convict, an ex-con and a fugitive, once escaping from a Maine prison by threatening guards with a fake gun he’d fashioned out of a bar of soap.
Released from federal prison in 2001, Connor has teamed up with novelist Jenny Siler to write a gripping tell-all, “The Art of the Heist.”
For a master of deceit, Connor is surprisingly candid. “Here’s exactly how we did it,” he writes, before describing, in detail, the broad-daylight theft of a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1975 (in this case, a real gun was vital).
The arc of Connor’s story — the son of a police officer, growing up with a love of the finer things that landed him on the other side of the law — is cinematic, and his book offers a fascinating look inside the mind of an unrepentant criminal: “Stealing from a museum archive is a lot like robbing your grandmother’s attic,” he writes. “The pieces I took would, I reasoned, not be missed by the overburdened museum staff. I, on the other hand, loved and appreciated them.”
NONFICTION
The Art of the Heist: Confessions of a Master Art Thief, Rock-and-Roller, and Prodigal Son
by Myles J. Connor Jr. and Jenny Siler
$26.99
Midway through his lush new memoir, “Tales of Wonder,” religious scholar Huston Smith pauses to rattle off a list of fond remembrances: dancing among the whirling dervishes in Iran, camping with the Aborigines in Australia, sharing a chuckle with a gaggle of Masai warriors on the darkening Serengeti plains.
Each anecdote is offered with minimum explication and just a few choice adjectives, as if Smith’s sense of marvel at the strange bounty of the world should suffice. And in most cases, it does.
“Tales of Wonder,” co-written with Jeffery Paine, opens in the medieval town of Soochow, China, where Smith’s parents served as missionaries, and ends, some 200 pages later, with a quote from Saint John Chrysostom: “Praise for everything. Praise for it all!”
In between, Smith meets with some of the 20th century’s major luminaries — Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Martin Luther King Jr. — and sets out to carve his own name into the face of history.
When he was just shy of 40, Smith published his opus, “The World’s Religions,” a now classic study of comparative theology. Its popularity opened the door to a series of professorial posts and several trips around the globe, each one more spectacular than the last.
“For me,” confides Smith, now nearly 90, “any real reason to travel, even a bad one, was a good reason to pack my bags and set off. If a place was on the map, and especially if it wasn’t, I wanted to go and learn what could be learned only there.”
NONFICTION
Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine
by Huston Smith, with Jeffery Paine
$25.99
