An absorbing voyage into the demimonde of the diamantaire.
Canadian journalist Hart, editor of the trade journal Rapaport Diamond Report, knows his diamonds, which he rather fancifully calls “windows polished into the heart of man.” Moreover, he knows by face and name many of the principal players in the world diamond trade. Some of those he profiles in this lively narrative are the brothers Campos, garimpeiros (small-scale miners) who in May 1999 found a rare 81-carat pink diamond that wandered the earth, selling for millions of dollars here, reselling for many millions more there; officers of the highly secretive De Beers company, which, until very recently, held a near-worldwide monopoly on the diamond trade; and maverick geologists such as the young Canadian Eira Thomas, whose hunches about mineral deposits in the Arctic turned up a trove estimated to contain 138 million carats of diamonds, enough to supply the world market for at least 20 years—and enough, in combination with other factors, to break the De Beers cartel. Hart observes that diamonds are common throughout the universe. Carbon, from which they are formed, is the fourth most abundant element, he writes, and many of the meteorites that arc across the galaxies contain diamonds in concentrations 300 times richer than the average terrestrial mine; geologists conjecture that a barrage of such meteorites seeded the earth over many millions of years, so that “the diamond on someone’s finger might contain at its center a dot of a jewel whose antiquity goes back 10 billion years.” But diamonds tend to be located where they’re hard to get to, and those who know where to look understandably tend to be close-mouthed about the whole business.
Hart doubtless keeps a few secrets for himself, but he unlocks many more in a text studded with oddments, lore, and technical data, all lightly related. Diamond fanciers and geology buffs alike will find this a trove of information.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-1368-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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