The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. 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.

Lapidarium) - Goodreads Books by Hettie Judah (Author of Lapidarium) - Goodreads

When compared to similar books across other subjects, like Around the World in 80 Trees, I find this sorely lacking. This is Old Red Sandstone and proof that the Earth was a lot older than previously thought by Biblical timelines. Buckland found himself embroiled in another Yorkshire adventure when 1821 workmen found hyena, tiger, bear, wolf, elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus bones in caves at Kirkdale, which he pronounced to have been ‘inhabitants of antediluvian Yorkshire’.Each essay isn't actually about a stone, it's a niche tale about people with a connection to the stone in question, and it's the people that the essay focuses on. The association between diamonds and love might just be shrewd marketing by jewellers, but Judah suggests that their association with bad luck might also stem from sales patter, the connection talked up by auctioneers to add gothic lustre to indifferent stones.

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (Audio Download

Jadeite – the word ‘jade’ actually signifies two different stones, jadeite and nephrite – was prized by the Mayan civilisation for its association with ripening maize, the staple that was for Mayans the stuff of life. I would have appreciated photographs of some of the wonders described - it would have been handier than having to use Google. 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.

Judah's pages are filled with eccentrics and inventors, with the obsessive pursuit of beauty, the hopeful constructions of belief and the thirst for progress and improvement. It's got history, art, science, anthropology, geology, archaeology, history of fashion, religion, culture, folklore, industrial history, and so much more.

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones - Goodreads

The essays are shaped with great skill and Judah finds curious and pleasing symmetry and coincidences in the varied stories she tells [. The selections struck me as arbitrary, despite the author’s explanations as to why certain things belonged in one chapter rather than another. It could seem a dry book but it's quite fascinating as there's historical, geological facts and the lore for each of them.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. The children’s version of Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones will be published by Laurence King in 2025 with illustrations by the amazing Jennifer N. Whitby jet, imbued with the spirit of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, inspires tales of male priests who cut off their own genitalia to identify as women, 1982 excavations at Cataractonium – a third-century Roman military base on the River Swale, climate change in the Lower Jurassic period, promiscuous women simulating states of virginity, and warding off snakes. With pertinent references to sustainability, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening book with perfectly paced narration. Each chapter focuses on a different stone or rock and its significance in art, history or literature.