Jewels: A Secret History
by Victoria Finlay
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Book Summary Information
Author: Victoria FinlayEdition: Paperback
Published: 2007-08-14
ISBN: 0345466950
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Jewels: A Secret History
Book Review: travel, history and gem facts all in one
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked this book up in a museum shop because I love jewelry and have always wondered about where jewels and gems come from.
Other reviews have given an overall synopsis, so I will just say that there are fascinating stories in this book.
The story that captivated me the most was the author's search for opals in Coober Pedy, Australia, where the sun is so intense that the people used to live underground. Finley has included a photo of an elderly miner outside his underground home.
Finley went down into the opal mines, as she did many other mines around the world in search of jewels.
She incorporates many photos and engravings, several in color.
But, the author's last paragraphs are probably the best:
"We can use diamonds in whatever way we like.....There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation...and there is a company's profit curve.The diamond I was holding was about illusion and about slicing through illusion. It was about forever and never, and it was about nothing at all."
Summary of Jewels: A Secret History
Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. In this scintillating book, journalist Victoria Finlay embarks on her own globe-circling search for the real stories behind some of the gems we prize most. Blending adventure travel, geology, exciting new research, and her own irresistible charm, Finlay has fashioned a treasure hunt for some of the most valuable, glamorous, and mysterious substances on earth.With the same intense curiosity and narrative flair she displayed in her widely-praised book Color, Finlay journeys from the underground opal churches of outback Australia to the once pearl-rich rivers of Scotland; from the peridot mines on an Apache reservation in Arizona to the remote ruby mines in the mountains of northern Burma. She risks confronting scorpions to crawl through Cleopatra’s long-deserted emerald mines, tries her hand at gem cutting in the dusty Sri Lankan city where Marco Polo bartered for sapphires, and investigates a rumor that fifty years ago most of the world’s amber was mined by prisoners in a Soviet gulag.
Jewels is a unique and often exhilarating voyage through history, across cultures, deep into the earth’s mantle, and up to the glittering heights of fame, power, and wealth. From the fabled curse of the Hope Diamond, to the disturbing truths about how pearls are cultured, to the peasants who were once executed for carrying amber to the centuries-old quest by magicians and scientists to make a perfect diamond, Jewels tells dazzling stories with a wonderment and brilliance truly worthy of its subjects.
From the Hardcover edition.
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