Hello and welcome to our first ever Patrons' Pick episode!

Four times a year, as a thank you for their support, I am handing over the programming reins to patrons of the show on Patreon where they can vote on who should come on the podcast. Over the summer, supporters of the podcast selected today's guest, Gerri Chanel, and her book "Saving Mona Lisa: The Battle to Protect the Louvre and Its Treasures from the Nazis." We have another poll up for our next Patrons' Pick episode in December. The candidates to invite to the show are: Mark Simmons, author of "Ian Fleming and Operation Golden Eye: Keeping Spain Out of World War II," Julia Flynn Siler, author of "The White Devil's Daughters: The Woman Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown," and Brian Jay Jones, author of "Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination." 

Well I put out the call to the show's supporters this summer and they selected today's guest, Gerri Chanel, and her book, "Saving Mona Lisa: The Battle to Protect the Louvre and Its Treasures from the Nazis" to be featured on the show. Gerri is a prize-winning freelance journalist who spent years in Paris researching the tale of how a band of brave museum curators painstakingly evacuated the world's largest art museum ahead of the German Blitzkrieg and then kept Europe's most prized artwork, including the Mona Lisa, out of the hands of Hitler and the Nazis. Gerri joins me from New York via Skype to discuss her book, "Saving Mona Lisa."

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