Jewels: A Secret History

by Victoria Finlay

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345466950
• ISBN13: 9780345466952
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Jewels is a True Gem of a Book

Great book...Wonderful writing style. I have her other book "Color". I own a small handmade stone and pearl jewelry business so the purchase was a must for me! Am inspired by her inspiration of the stories and facts of gem lore. Her push via husband father in law as refrenced in the Preface... while in England at her father in laws memorial...Later taking a walk with her husband as they were discussing her doing this book or not and what her Father in law would tell her, that "you must do it"... While looking down into the canal a small canal boat named "Little GEM" happened to be going by just at that very momnet...Later found out "that it was rare for Little Gem to be on that stretch of the Thames: she is a weekend hire barge near Rugby, and only very occasionally finds herself so far south." One of Derek's (father in law) passions was canals and canal boats. This world craves more great stories and inspiration to go along with the facts...Victoria, you have artfully written another gem! Thanks...

travel, history and gem facts all in one

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."

Interesting, well-written

Very interesting book that's well-written. I bought another of Ms. Finlay's books, "Color" because I liked this one so much. I like how she's organized the 'chapters' on the Moh scale of hardness, and the stories of her adventures in discovering each of the gems are just wonderful. A great, informative, enjoyable read.

Great book, but don't be fooled

Victoria Finlay is an engaging writer, and I recommend her books, but don't be fooled by the different titles used for the same work. Buried Treasure: Travels Through the Jewellery Box: UK English edition Jewels: A Short History: American English edition Colour: Travels through the Paintbox: UK English edition Color: A Natural History of the Palette: American English edition On the jacket flap, when they say this is her third book, the missing one is on an entirely different topic: Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religions and the Environment (World Bank Directions in Development) Martin Palmer with Victoria Finlay.

Sparkling History

"It is an ordinary gemstone," writes Victoria Finlay of the sapphire in a ring given to her by her parents, "yet like most other ordinary gemstones it has a good story to tell, if you go looking for it." Go looking she does, not only for the story of that sapphire but for those of other gems, and yes, she found good stories and writes them up in _Jewels: A Secret History_ (Ballantine Books). Indeed, she values the stories more than the stones' rarity, perfection, or size. She set out to tell stories of nine different stones, from semi-precious to precious, and from two to ten on the Mohs hardness scale. The scale, invented in 1825 by mineralogist Freidrich Mohs, simply rates stones and other substances by what they can scratch and what scratches them; talc rates a one and diamond, the hardest substance known, rates a ten. Finlay ranges her chapters from softest stone to hardest: amber (Mohs somewhere between gypsum 2 and calcite 3), through jet, pearl, opal, peridot, emerald, sapphire, ruby, and finally diamond. (It is interesting that value tends to increase with hardness, indicating that we place a premium on durability.) Even the biggest stones, Finley notes, are objects that are really rather small, but the stories encompass great swaths of human history and technical expertise. I will mention here only her quest for amber, for which she visits the Polish Baltic coast, a source for the stone. You may know the sticky sap that is oozed out when a pine tree is injured, and amber is the fossilized version of the same thing. Its origin is mysterious, because for amber to have become the geologic deposit as it is now found, huge numbers of evergreens (the species of tree is no longer with us) must have been hit with some sort of disease or other stress. Amber is the stuff that entrapped the mosquito that had dined on the blood of the dinosaur which yielded the DNA to build the monsters of the movie Jurassic Park. Its prices rose sharply when that movie came out in 1993, demonstrating our whimsical notions of value. Finlay goes to the University of Gdansk where is located the Museum of Amber Inclusions, and a guide indeed shows her insects trapped within. There is a particularly strange sample that looks like a long fly, only it has twelve legs; it turns out to be two flies caught by the sap during copulation. She attends the Amber-Washing Championships at Jantar, Poland, in the expectation that she would even herself be able to wade into the sea to fish out amber with the rest of the competitors, but finds that the sea no longer easily yields this treasure. Competitors on the beach were looking for amber pieces as big as shirt buttons planted by the organizers. "The whole thing was as exhilarating as a grape-peeling competition" she grumbles. The local supply of amber comes from a mine in an ex-Soviet Gulag "even bleaker than I had expected." It is a constant theme: gems may sparkle, full of richness, but the areas from which t