NONFICTION
Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, the New World Order, and Many, Many More
by Arthur Goldwag
$16
Guidebooks have taken a pretty serious beating during the information age. It’s not their fault, though. It’s just that nobody wants to squint into Leonard Maltin’s paperback film guide when the Internet Movie Database is just a few clicks away.
But Arthur Goldwag’s “Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies” is the kind of reference manual that the Internet cannot supplant.
A Google search on the Raëlians, for instance, gets pretty confusing. But Goldwag’s brief essay on the hedonistic UFO-inspired religion — filed alphabetically under cults, between The Process Church of the Final Judgment and Roch “Moses” Theriault — is straightforward and to the point.
The same goes for his short takes on offbeat subjects such as the Rosicrucians and the Face on Mars.
Lining up fringe societies and phenomena side by side does make one thing clear: Cabals can get pretty kinky.
Indeed, cults and secret societies rarely seem to inspire G-rated behavior; witness the cases of cult leader Aleister Crowley (his motto was “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law”) and Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones Society (which is rumored to hold naked mud-wrestling matches).
Even Bohemian Grove — a rustic retreat attended by numerous elites and politicians — allows wanton public urination.
But Goldwag keeps the facts straight and gives the rumors — no matter how lurid and entertaining — about as much respect as they deserve.
FICTION
The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy’s Art During World War II
Ilaria Dagnini Brey
$26
They came to the battlefield by way of Harvard, Yale and Oxford. They sported neckerchiefs, cherished a good glass of wine and loved poetry. They were monuments officers — typically architects and art historians — with the tough job of protecting Italy’s art treasures in World War II.
The Venus Fixers, as they were nicknamed, saw little action at the front. Rather than charging into battle, they collected and cataloged masterpieces among the ruins of Naples and Florence after the war machine had moved on. They propped up church walls, patched leaky ceilings and arranged for guards to protect caches of irreplaceable art.
“While to some comrades the Venus Fixers may have looked like devoted and thorough housemaids, straightening, dusting, rearranging,” writes Ilaria Dagnini Brey in “The Venus Fixers,” her account of these men recruited by the Allied forces, “they were actually watching over a civilization’s heritage at a crucial time in its history.”
