John E Conklin – författare

This is the only book by a criminologist to look at the full range of crime involving works of art: forgery, fraud, theft, smuggling, and vandalism. It is up to date, drawing on much material from the boom years of the art market in the 1980s and continuing up through the 1990s, and assimilating information from a variety of sources: art magazines, newspaper accounts, and the relatively small amount of scholarship on art crime by art historians and criminologists. In addition to considering the motives of thieves, the book looks at the way art theft is socially organized: the types of thefts that are committed, the ways thieves locate art to steal and how they gain access to it, their use of insiders and fronts, and the way they launder stolen art. The relationship between art theft and organized crime, especially drug traffickers, is investigated. After looking at explanations of art vandalism and the way vandals explain their behavior, the book concludes with a consideration of policies to curb art crime. The entire book is written in a highly entertaining way, packed with case studies of numerous crimes and stories of smuggling, grave-robbing, and skullduggery, that will appeal to a general audience as well as professionals and academics in criminology, sociology, and art history.

Hollywood films have presented audiences with stories of campus life for nearly a century, shaping popular perceptions of our colleges and universities and the students who attend them. These depictions of campus life have even altered the attitudes of the students themselves, serving as both a mirror of and a model for behavior. One can only imagine how many high school seniors enter college today with the hopes of living the proverbial Animal House or PCU Greek experience, or how many have worried over the SAT and college admissions after watching more recent movies like 2004's The Perfect Score.This book explores themes of college life in 681 live-action, theatrically released, feature-length films set in the United States and released from 1915 through 2006, evaluating how these movies both reflected and distorted the reality of undergraduate life.Topics include college admissions, the freshman experience, academic work, professor-student relations, student romance, fraternity and sorority life, sports, political activism, and other extracurricular activities. The book also includes a complete filmography and 66 illustrations.