Quick, fun, easy reading for devotees of high fashion and mystery fans, complete with wrong turns and false friends.
The tale of “one of the most captivating and enduring pieces of jewelry,” which would “crawl into the world of collectors and jewelers to enchant and confound them” for more than eight decades.
When Burns wrote a biography of Millicent Rogers (Searching for Beauty, 2011, etc.), she was especially intrigued by one particular item in her subject’s jewelry collection: a hand-sized starfish that featured “71 cabochon rubies and 241 small amethysts.” Certainly expensive, it was more valuable for its rarity and perfection. Only three were originally made in the 1930s and perhaps two more later. The mystery begins with an exclusive jeweler in Paris, Boivin. There, Juliette Moutard had solid relationships with a variety of designers and workshops that met the demand for beautiful and well-designed pieces. They were so special that they were never signed; the jeweler knew that the pieces’ quality would prove their origin. Burns knew that Rogers had one of the starfish and held it for more than 70 years. Another was said to have been purchased by Claudette Colbert, a movie star well known for her magnificent jewels. Supposedly, she lost hers. As she searched for clues to the location of the starfish, the author discovered the very private world of jewelry sales. It is a business that pays little attention to provenance, unless a famous person, like Elizabeth Taylor, owned a particular piece. Equally tight lipped are the exclusive jewelers—e.g., Siegelson and Verdura—and brokers who are approached with pieces when owners suffer a death, bankruptcy, or divorce and must sell. Getting information from top jewelers is a challenge at best. As the author notes, there are other starfish, some with emeralds and sapphires, but the three originals are the subject of a long and frustrating search.
Quick, fun, easy reading for devotees of high fashion and mystery fans, complete with wrong turns and false friends.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-05620-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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