Hettie Judah breaks her book down by types of stones into these categories;Stones and Powers, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stones and Living Stones. This randomness does make it more interesting as amethyst is followed by cairngorm and tuff precedes turquoise. Then electricity is brought up again (without the connection back to elektron) and we are taken through a jarring summary of the discovery of amber's properties with a profusion of unexplained quotes. Her stories also bear out the tragic pattern of so much engagement with the natural world - what begins in wonder leads to greed andrapacious extraction.

g. the daughters of Helios the sun god, and their tears of elektron or 'beaming sun', and how elektron is the root to electricity etc etc), we are offered the greek name, and then. The essays are shaped with great skill and Judah finds curious and pleasing symmetry and coincidences in the varied stories she tells . And though I read this book straight through from start to finish, this is absolutely the sort of bibliomantic tome that one might flip through at random, choosing a chapter based on mood or whim: learn a weird rock fact, let it lodge in your brain like a wayward pebble in your shoe, and allow it to guide your energies for the day. We hear of incredible discoveries, greed, curses and forgeries alongside the geography and geology of their origins. There are books which really pull together history and science and nature and people but I find this is just not one of them.She has a great eye for the kind of story that's going to most appeal to the general reader, and provides a fascinating set of introductions to various objects and places: from Mongolian Deer Stones to Maltese Mother Goddesses to the Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan. With pertinent references to sustainability, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening book with perfectly paced narration.

The author, it seems, banks on the strengths of her background, and while the book promises to engage us with archeology, geology, mythology, literature, science, sociology and philosophy, any interesting cross-disciplinary facts are drowned out by the sheer volume of historical detailing. Writing with humor, compassion, and wit (I cackled out loud more times than I can count), Hettie leads us sure-footedly on our craggy journey down a glittering path of 60 mineralogical eccentricities, ancient souvenirs of deep-Earth drama, and travelogues that cross the strata of time as well as space. Not all the stories are happy - for instance, you'll learn about the past and present abuses involved in the coltan and coal mining industries - but they are such interesting introductions to all kinds of topics you might never have heard of. It is visually stunning with very high-quality illustrations and an overall fantastic design of the book. These are stories about rocks, it’s not a geological textbook, but I learned a hell of a lot on the way, mostly I learned how little I know about geology and how cool rocks are.For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

Het boek doet wat denken aan het boek van Kassia St Clair over kleuren , maar dan met bevlogen verhalen over gesteenten die toch wat deden nadenken Bv over de invloed van de prijs van de aflaten of over de PlayStation war , die de verhalen niet altijd even licht maken .

As a broadcaster she can been heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Journeying from granite and old red sandstone, rocks formed deep within the Earth's crust, to the moon rock samples that only recently revealed how Earth's only satellite was formed, and through the realms of art, myth, geology, philosophy and power, from the Stone Age onwards, Lapidarium is a dazzling, epoch-spanning story of humanity, told through the minerals and materials that have shaped us and inspired us. It is split into six sections (Stones and Power, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stone, and Living Stones), and each section reveals a chapter devoted to unearthing an individual stone with imaginative, artful descriptions and a pretty wild, or wildly fascinating story connected to each stone.

This book talks a lot about the history of stones, how they came to be, their presence in geological and human history, and culture. It is a series of essays, each with a different rock or mineral highlighted, that delves into history, geology, culture, or anthropology. And not to mention the hysterical metaphysical WTFery of angel-appointed wife swaps in the chapter of alchemist and astrologer John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm, as well as, the mystical modern-day TikTik moldavite craze vibing amongst those of the witchy-psychic persuasion. Well, not really, but that is the tone this book takes, and despite the interesting collection of rocks and minerals detailed in this book, the focus is heavily and irredeemably skewed towards art and history.

The only reason for not giving it 5 stars is that I'm a chemist and would have like to have the chemical formulas for the stones. Hettie Judah is chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian’s arts pages, and a columnist for Apollo magazine.