A collection of extravagant stories about artists, miners, princes, chancers, criminals - and above all collectors . In Lapidarium, renowned art critic Hettie Judah explores the unexpected stories behind sixty stones that have shaped and inspired human history, from Dorset fossil-hunters to Chinese philosophers, Catherine the Great to Michelangelo.

The essays are written from a British point of view, which took a little getting used to (especially some of the pronunciations in audio book), but it was very well done. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Here's the thing: I wanted to be able to come away from each chapter able to say a couple of sentences about each stone, but this book will leave you with a half–remembered sentence on someone who owned the stone in a century you probably won't remember. Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, Lapidarium is a collection of essays about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history. 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.

There are books which really pull together history and science and nature and people but I find this is just not one of them. 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. 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.

Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, Lapidarium builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.

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. My only complaint is I wish it had more illustrations and photos of these amazing objects and natural resources. Lapidarium is a wonderfully informative history of sixty of the most fascinating stones, their many stories and the people and places linked with them.

As a broadcaster she can been heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. I felt like I was reading a set of blog posts--not systematic, but an agreeable and informative experience overall.

With pertinent references to sustainability, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening book with perfectly paced narration. She weaves stone through human history showing us how we gave different types of stone the power of royalty and worship. While the diversity of the stones and the geology are fascinating, what I particularly enjoyed was learning about the ways in which humans have used these stones, from the Malachite Room in Russia’s Winter Palace to the giant stone Medusa heads in the underground cisterns in Istanbul to the ‘meat stone’ that draws crowds in Taipei.

Not yet ready to leave this post-book mental space now lit crystalline and glittering with the fruits of the earth thanks to Hettie’s heady prose, I thought I might ask the author and art historian a few questions–which she kindly answered for me in this blog post https://unquietthings.I want information I won't find in the first minute of a wikipedia scroll, and I want something memorable enough to take away. 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. I truly lost myself reading this book and discovering how important stones are to us all even in our modern age.