Stealing the Show (CBR15 #15)

May is Preservation Month, and in honor of that there is a push in the museum community to work on safety and preservation policies and procedures that all too often get pushed to the bottom of the to do list. Disaster and emergency preparedness are parts of my job that I enjoy and this year’s May focus for me was theft reporting procedures, which made Stealing the Show timely reading. But I wanted the book that this one’s subtitle describes and this isn’t it. (I’m bummed since Managing Expectations did such a good job, well, managing expectations with its subtitle.)

So, what is this book then? A personal history of John Barelli and his time with the security department of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Barelli spent the better part of forty years responsible for one of the world’s most diverse museum collections, but also the museum’s staff, the millions of visitors, as well as the dignitaries which make their way to the museum each year. Barelli shares his experiences of the crimes that occurred on his watch; the investigations that captured thieves and recovered artwork; the lessons he learned and shared with law enforcement professionals in the United States and abroad; the accidents and near misses; and a few mysteries that were sadly never solved. While it is a comprehensive forty-year look, it is also uneven. It also is more a recounting and less a history and I couldn’t tell you which six thefts Barelli intended to be the focus.

What I did take away from this one in the positive column is the ways that Barelli helped establish what are now industry standards in museum security (although I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out the amazing work that the Getty does – and shares with other institutions, something the Met is not known for). This one is short, coming in just shy of 200 pages and I wonder if a retooling away from a personal history and instead a focus more heavily on the art and antiquities would have made this a better read for me. But – I might be the wrong audience for this, knowing too much about the field.

Managing Expectations (CBR15 #14)

Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been following along with Minnie Driver’s acting career in real time since her debut in Circle of Friends. Several of her performances have stood out to me over the years and as I have a fondness for memoirs, picking hers up seemed inevitable and going the author read audio route all the better. For almost a week Driver’s voice accompanied me on my various drives (and notably in and out of Philly for work in a day) and it was truly delightfully pleasant.

That might seem like faint praise but given my reading year delightfully pleasant is really quite high praise. In Managing Expectations Driver is thoughtful and introspective, unpacking the personality quirks and lived experience that make her who she is. About half the book skips through Driver’s childhood as she grows up in the shadow of her parents’ failed relationship and the fact that her mom was her dad’s mistress and her mom’s battles to maintain custody of her daughters in the 1970s.

The subtitle of this book gives an important indication of its parameters. Driver selected stories that highlight various times in her life and explore a larger topic or theme. I won’t go into them here; I’m hoping you’ll read them for yourself (also… its been four weeks since I read this) but while her career is a focal point it isn’t the only one. The complexities of life are the real point of the book. Driver approaches it all with grace. Grace for herself, and grace for those who were in and out of her life.