![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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 mo. ![]() ![]() ![]() Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. (Trade Paperback / Paperback, illustrated edition) ![]()
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