Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World

Amazon.com Price: $12.85 (as of 06/12/2019 04:45 PST- Details)

Description

As entertaining as it’s incisive, Stoned is a raucous journey through the history of human desire for what is rare, and subsequently precious.

What makes a stone a jewel? What makes a jewel priceless? And why do we covet beautiful things? In this brilliant account of how eight jewels shaped the course of history, jeweler and scientist Aja Raden tells an original and continuously startling story about our unshakeable addiction to beauty and the darker side of human desire.

What moves the world is what moves each and every of us: desire. Jewelry—which has long served as a stand-in for wealth and power, glamor and success—has birthed cultural movements, launched political dynasties, and began wars. Masterfully weaving together pop science and history, Stoned breaks history into three categories—Want, Take, and Have—and explains what the diamond on your finger has to do with the GI Bill, why green-tinted jewelry has been exalted by such a lot of cultures, why the glass beads that bought Manhattan for the Dutch were to start with thought to be a fair trade, and how the French Revolution began over a coveted necklace.

Studded with full of life personalities and fascinating details, Stoned tells the remarkable story of our abiding desire for the rare and abnormal.

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