cover image HOPE: Adventures of a Diamond

HOPE: Adventures of a Diamond

Marian Fowler, . . Ballantine, $26 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-345-44486-8

Billed as the biography of the Hope Diamond, this comprehensive but overwritten book traces the cherished jewel's history from its formation in India more than a billion years ago to its current status as museum treasure. In her painstaking saga of the diamond's "life," Canadian Fowler (Blenheim: Biography of a Palace;In a Gilded Cage: American Heiresses Who Married British Aristocrats; etc.) hypothesizes about the blue diamond's origins, then introduces readers to each of its owners. The first, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French merchant, sold the stone to King Louis XIV; the last, American jeweler Harry Winston, donated it to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where the 45-carat gem has drawn millions of visitors for the past 40 years. Fowler's chronicle traverses the diamond's passage—from the pockets of thieves who stole the diamond during the French Revolution to England and its namesake owner, Henry Philip Hope, into the hands of a social-climbing actress; then across the ocean to America, where an alcoholic heiress donned it frequently for parties—but the author's clichéd and overdramatic prose mars the gripping tale. Writing of Philip Hope, she gushes that the diamond "had found the man who, of all its many owners, would love it most faithfully and intensely, love it for its own essence and grace...." Though Fowler honorably corrects false rumors about the diamond and offers a few engaging tangents, this volume does not do its worthy subject justice. Agent, Jay Mandel. (Apr.)

Forecast:Diamonds may be timeless, but they're also particularly in vogue now, at least in books. In October, W.H. Freeman released Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic and in November, Walker published Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (Forecasts, Oct. 22).