An overstuffed, endlessly interesting treat for anyone interested in any aspect of jewels.
A brightly entertaining natural and cultural history of gemstones and the worlds they contain.
The title may bring to mind Tolkien’s ring-obsessed Gollum, and indeed there are a few grasping, jewel-smitten characters in Molesworth’s survey. The book, she writes, was born of her long career in gemology, inspired by a remark her father made when she confessed that she wanted to work in neither the corporate world nor academia: “Hair, makeup, clothes, jewelry. Pick one.” She chose wisely, for, as her book recounts, she’s done a little bit of everything, serving as curator, cataloger, auctioneer, appraiser, and all-around scholar, working in a field that is “almost a perfect synthesis of every subject under the sun.” Sometimes her enthusiasm builds to a geekfest, as when, in a swoon of gemological language, she recounts all the different jades that aren’t really jades: “a mishmash of tough, translucent-to-opaque greenish materials such as serpentine, bowenite, amazonite, marble, quartzite, and chrysoprase.” In fact, as she goes on to note, what is classified today as “true jade” is either nephrite or jadeite. There’s a lively smattering of cocktail-party-worthy trivia on every page: the origins of the “eternity ring,” courtesy of a marketing genius at De Beers who had to figure out what to do with a glut of small diamonds introduced from Siberian mines in the 1950s; the history of the massive tanzanite ring that Beyoncé wore after her first child was born, as well as the tsavorite ring Jay-Z gave her, “now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.” A highlight in a book full of them is Molesworth’s considered judgment that the references to rubies in the Old Testament “were almost certainly to garnet,” a little stone that earns a little more love thanks to her generous assessment of its significance.
An overstuffed, endlessly interesting treat for anyone interested in any aspect of jewels.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9780593500880
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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