Download or read book Cursed Diamonds written by Vedika Nadig and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Peterson, a boy of American origin, aged 11 years, is living in India in the year 2018. He is a very curious person and is longing to know what is in store for him in his future. His hobbies include exploring caves, travelling to historical places and discovering jungles or any isolated place. One day he stumbled upon a mystery. A mystery he called, The cursed diamond! Starting from a relic and continuing with solving riddles, how will James, Leslie, Toby, Skipper and Jason go around the world retrieving diamonds? How will they survive the hectic cities of the Northern hemisphere and the strong gales and shivering winters of the Southern hemisphere? Who could be following them, lurking in the shadows…

Download or read book Hope Diamond written by Richard Kurin and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining and well-researched history of the Hope diamond Since its discovery in seventeenth-century India, the Hope diamond, a glimmering deep blue gem weighing over 45 carats, has been shrouded in mystery and steeped in intrigue. In this groundbreaking work, Dr. Richard Kurin goes beyond the speculation to reveal the truth behind a legendary stone. Kurin, a cultural anthropologist, spent more than a decade on the trail of the legendary gem. But the 'curse' that surrounds it, which Kurin puts to rest once and for all, is only one small piece of a long and lustrous story that moves between ancient religion and modern magic, royal power and class rivalry, revenge and greed. Richly illustrated, Hope Diamond works in a grand historical tradition: depicting the specific to reveal the universal.

Download or read book The Cartiers written by Francesca Cartier Brickell and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A dynamic group biography studded with design history and high-society dash . . . [This] elegantly wrought narrative bears the Cartier hallmark.”—The Economist The “astounding” (André Leon Talley) story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their grandfather’s humble Parisian jewelry store into a global luxury icon—as told by a great-granddaughter with exclusive access to long-lost family archives “Ms. Cartier Brickell has done her grandfather proud.”—The Wall Street Journal The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty—four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s. At its heart are the three Cartier brothers whose motto was “Never copy, only create” and who made their family firm internationally famous in the early days of the twentieth century, thanks to their unique and complementary talents: Louis, the visionary designer who created the first men’s wristwatch to help an aviator friend tell the time without taking his hands off the controls of his flying machine; Pierre, the master dealmaker who bought the New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue for a double-stranded natural pearl necklace; and Jacques, the globe-trotting gemstone expert whose travels to India gave Cartier access to the world’s best rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, inspiring the celebrated Tutti Frutti jewelry. Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose great-grandfather was the youngest of the brothers, has traveled the world researching her family’s history, tracking down those connected with her ancestors and discovering long-lost pieces of the puzzle along the way. Now she reveals never-before-told dramas, romances, intrigues, betrayals, and more. The Cartiers also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the firm’s most iconic jewelry—the notoriously cursed Hope Diamond, the Romanov emeralds, the classic panther pieces—and the long line of stars from the worlds of fashion, film, and royalty who wore them, from Indian maharajas and Russian grand duchesses to Wallis Simpson, Coco Chanel, and Elizabeth Taylor. Published in the two-hundredth anniversary year of the birth of the dynasty’s founder, Louis-François Cartier, this book is a magnificent, definitive, epic social history shown through the deeply personal lens of one legendary family.

Download or read book The Hope Diamond Cursed Objects and Unexplained Artifacts written by Joel Newsome and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who has watched Indiana Jones knows that curses can have very real implications. However, is there such a thing today as cursed objects? This book explores some of the most well-known cursed objects, from the Hope Diamond to Tutankhamun's tomb, and looks to science, through the use of photographs, eyewitness accounts, elaborate hoaxes, and evidence, to answer whether curses are real.

Download or read book Cursed Diamonds The Retrieve written by Vedika Nadig and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Peterson, a boy of American origin, aged 11 years, is living in India in the year 2018. He is a very curious person and is longing to know what is in store for him in his future. His hobbies include exploring caves, travelling to historical places and discovering jungles or any isolated place. One day he stumbled upon a mystery. A mystery he called, The cursed diamond! Starting from a relic and continuing with solving riddles, how will James, Leslie, Toby, Skipper and Jason go around the world retrieving diamonds? How will they survive the hectic cities of the Northern hemisphere and the strong gales and shivering winters of the Southern hemisphere? Who could be following them, lurking in the shadows...

Download or read book All the Light We Cannot See written by Anthony Doerr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Download or read book Koh i Noor written by William Dalrymple and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally acclaimed and bestselling historians William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, the first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, arguably the most celebrated jewel in the world. On March 29, 1849, the ten-year-old leader of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the center of the British fort in Lahore, India. There, in a formal Act of Submission, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company swathes of the richest land in India and the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, otherwise known as the Mountain of Light. To celebrate the acquisition, the British East India Company commissioned a history of the diamond woven together from the gossip of the Delhi Bazaars. From that moment forward, the Koh-i-Noor became the most famous and mythological diamond in history, with thousands of people coming to see it at the 1851 Great Exhibition and still more thousands repeating the largely fictitious account of its passage through history. Using original eyewitness accounts and chronicles never before translated into English, Dalrymple and Anand trace the true history of the diamond and disperse the myths and fantastic tales that have long surrounded this awe-inspiring jewel. The resulting history of south and central Asia tells a true tale of greed, conquest, murder, torture, colonialism, and appropriation that shaped a continent and the Koh-i-Noor itself.

Download or read book Cursed in New York written by Randi Minetor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of riveting stories about preternatural revenge. Discover the riveting stories about Queen Esther and the Iroquois Slaughter, The Curse of Mamie O’Rourke, The Rangers, the Stanley Cup and the Curse of 1940, The Death of a President and the City that Fails to Thrive, and many more. Some stories will be regionally well known. Others are nearly forgotten. All are cursed.

Download or read book Hope Diamond written by Richard Kurin and published by Smithsonian. This book was released on 2006-05-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story behind the most famous–and infamous–stone in the world. The Hope diamond is not only exceptionally beautiful it has a long and incredibly colorful history. That history – spread over three continents – features diamond mining in India, the French Revolution, the machinations of British King George IV, the Gilded Age in America and a number of very clever jewelers including Pierre Cartier and Harry Winston. In the 20th century, the myth of the Hope diamond curse made the diamond more notorious and famous than ever before, but it is only one small piece of a long and lustrous history. Dr. Kurin, who is a cultural anthropologist, has spent over a decade on the trail of the Hope, from India, to France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, and England. His narrative is filled with fascinating places and people – from the fabled diamond city of Golconda to the fabulously rich heiress Evalyn McLean to Jackie Kennedy and her pivotal role in one of the Hope's few 20th century trips abroad.

Download or read book Cursed by Diamonds written by Jennifer Ensley and published by . This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Toads and Diamonds written by Heather Tomlinson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diribani has come to the village well to get water for her family's scant meal of curry and rice. She never expected to meet a goddess there. Yet she is granted a remarkable gift: Flowers and precious jewels drop from her lips whenever she speaks. It seems only right to Tana that the goddess judged her kind, lovely stepsister worthy of such riches. And when she encounters the goddess, she is not surprised to find herself speaking snakes and toads as a reward. Blessings and curses are never so clear as they might seem, however. Diribani's newfound wealth brings her a prince—and an attempt on her life. Tana is chased out of the village because the province's governor fears snakes, yet thousands are dying of a plague spread by rats. As the sisters' fates hang in the balance, each struggles to understand her gift. Will it bring her wisdom, good fortune, love . . . or death? Toads and Diamonds is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Download or read book Why Nations Fail written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Currency. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

Download or read book Empire of Diamonds written by Adrienne Munich and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria’s outstretched hands. This act inaugurated what author Adrienne Munich recognizes in her engaging new book as the empire of diamonds. Diamonds were a symbol of political power—only for the very rich and influential. But, in a development that also reflected the British Empire’s prosperity, the idea of owning a diamond came to be marketed to the middle class. In all kinds of writings, diamonds began to take on an affordable romance. Considering many of the era’s most iconic voices—from Dickens and Tennyson to Kipling and Stevenson—as well as grand entertainments such as The Moonstone, King Solomon’s Mines, and the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Munich explores diamonds as fetishes that seem to contain a living spirit exerting powerful effects, and shows how they scintillated the literary and cultural imagination. Based on close textual attention and rare archival material, and drawing on ideas from material culture, fashion theory, economic criticism, and fetishism, Empire of Diamonds interprets the various meanings of diamonds, revealing a trajectory including Indian celebrity-named diamonds reserved for Asian princes, such as the Great Mogul and the Hope Diamond, their adoption by British royal and aristocratic families, and their discovery in South Africa, the mining of which devastated the area even as it opened the gem up to the middle classes. The story Munich tells eventually finds its way to America, as power and influence cross the Atlantic, bringing diamonds to a wide consumer culture.

Download or read book The Witches Almanac Issue 35 Spring 2016 to Spring 2017 written by Andrew Theitic and published by The Witches’ Almanac. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1971, The Witches’ Almanac is a witty, literate, and sophisticated publication that appeals to general readers as well as hard-core Wiccans. At one level, it is a pop reference that will fascinate anyone interested in folklore, mythology, and culture, but at another, it is the most sophisticated and wide-ranging annual guide available today for the mystic enthusiast. Modeled after the Old Farmers’ Almanac, it includes information related to the annual moon calendar (weather forecasts and horoscopes), as well as legends, rituals, herbal secrets, mystic incantations, interviews, and many a curious tale of good and evil. Although it is an annual publication with about 15 percent of the content specific to the date range of each issue, there are pages and pages of interesting and timeless articles about Witchcraft/Wicca, magic, herbalism, charms, spells, and related topics. The theme of Issue 35 (Spring 2016 – Spring 2017) is air: the breath of life. Also included are articles on Lithuanian Day of the Dead, Nine Elements of the Druids, Tomb Sweeping Day, Kohl, and the Akashic Records.

Download or read book The Witches Almanac Issue 35 Spring 2016 Spring 2017 written by Theitic and published by The Witches' Almanac. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1971, The Witches’ Almanac is a witty, literate, and sophisticated publication that appeals to general readers as well as hard-core Wiccans. At one level, it is a pop reference that will fascinate anyone interested in folklore, mythology, and culture, but at another, it is the most sophisticated and wide-ranging annual guide available today for the mystic enthusiast. Modeled after the Old Farmers’ Almanac, it includes information related to the annual moon calendar (weather forecasts and horoscopes), as well as legends, rituals, herbal secrets, mystic incantations, interviews, and many a curious tale of good and evil. Although it is an annual publication with about 15 percent of the content specific to the date range of each issue, there are pages and pages of interesting and timeless articles about Witchcraft/Wicca, magic, herbalism, charms, spells, and related topics. The theme of Issue 35 (Spring 2016 – Spring 2017) is air: the breath of life. Also included are articles on Lithuanian Day of the Dead, Nine Elements of the Druids, Tomb Sweeping Day, Kohl, and the Akashic Records.

Download or read book The Diamond Setter written by Moshe Sakal and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by true events, this best-selling Israeli novel traces a complex web of love triangles, homoerotic tensions, and family secrets across generations and borders, illuminating diverse facets of life in the Middle East. The uneventful life of a jeweler from Tel Aviv changes abruptly in 2011 after Fareed, a handsome young man from Damascus, crosses illegally into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa in search of his roots. In his pocket is a piece of a famous blue diamond known as "Sabakh." Intending to return the diamond to its rightful owner, Fareed is soon swept up in Tel Aviv's vibrant gay scene, and a turbulent protest movement. He falls in love with both an Israeli soldier and his boyfriend--the narrator of this book--and reveals the story of his family's past: a tale of forbidden love beginning in the 1930s that connects Fareed and the jeweler. Following Sabakh's winding path, The Diamond Setter ties present-day events to a forgotten time before the establishment of the State of Israel divided the region. Moshe Sakal's poignant mosaic of characters, locales, and cultures encourages us to see the Middle East beyond its violent conflicts.

Download or read book Cursed by Diamonds written by J. K. Ensley and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much of yourself can you sacrifice before you are no longer who you once were? Is it worth it? Is winning worth any price? Is freedom? Every curse has a blessing and every blessing has a curse. When you stand face to face with your destiny, will you be able to tell one from the other? In a world filled with darkness and hate, ignorance and fear, the only answer needed should be love and light, happiness and acceptance. Well, it should be. Good versus evil, daylight over darkness, Angels or demons...the age old epic battle rages through the universe. One thing always rings true, love triumphs over all. But, what if a pure and loving heart unintentionally caused Angels to fall, demons to rise, and blurred the line between heaven and hell? Jenevier owns such a heart. An innocent, unadulterated purity that is too quick to find good where none exists. Her blind trust and radiant soul could be the answer long sought, or, it could mark the end of us all. An epic journey of love and magic, curses and trials, joys and pain, Cursed by Diamonds is only the beginning. Follow this fragile maiden; thrust upon a fated path wrought with world altering decisions, as she blindly begins A Dance with Destiny. And, this little tune may change all our lives.