A polished young guide takes us on an insider’s tour of the recondite world of diamonds and garnishes it with an introduction to her family.
Oltuski sees the business from a favored vantage. Her father, an experienced dealer in precious stones, is based in New York’s diamond district on 47th St. There, in little booths, dusty factories, locked offices, appraisal labs and on the busy street, fabulous deals are made with one Hebrew word and a handshake. The industry is still founded, as it has been for generations, on good names and reputations for honest dealing. As ever, the value of those precious stones, often passed hand to hand in little paper packets, depends on carat weight, color, clarity and cut—the four Cs. Eye appeal counts, as well. Oltuski summarizes with authority how the hard little pebbles become valuable and attractive objects of romance, and the author recounts the story of De Beers and “the syndicate,” of distribution and marketing. She writes of geology and gemology, of cleaving and cutting, polishing, setting, selling, the physical properties of the gems and the anxieties of dealing in them. She touches on security measures, blood diamonds and the industry’s efforts to deal only in “kosher” diamonds. In forays away from 47th St., we travel uptown to an upscale auction house and to shows in Las Vegas and Switzerland. The author notes that the real estate of the street is shifting, and younger dealers are scarce. Carbon-based gems, she writes, are formulated in laboratories, and she relates the odd fact that the remains of loved ones, once carbonized, may be permanently transformed into precious diadems and rings. Clear, colorful reportage.
Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4512-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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