cover image Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

Hettie Judah. Penguin, $22 (336p) ISBN 978-0-143137-41-2

Judah (Frida Kahlo), senior art critic at the British newspaper The i, offers a beautifully illustrated collection of insightful essays that “explore how human culture has formed stone, and the roles stone has played in forming human culture.” Judah digs into 60 types, describing, for example, how people in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia turned alunite into alum, a compound used for tanning and textile production: “You could make a fortune from rock and old urine. You just needed the right rock. And the right recipe.” Marble offers a look at “the Roman Empire in its pomp” as well as its decline, and diamonds are shrouded in tall tales: “As long as gemstones have been associated with magic, silver-tongued storytellers have attributed powers for both good and ill,” Judah writes. Pink ancaster, a form of limestone, is the material used in Barbara Hepworth’s 1934 sculpture Mother and Child, and haüyne, a rare mineral, “occurs in a zippy blue that declares modernity.” Judah elegantly mixes archaeology, mythology, literature, and philosophy, building a solid case that “so much of what we think of as culture—our modes and places of worship, the tools we use, the materials in which we adorn ourselves, the stories we spin, our graven images—is formed by geology.” This clever outing fascinates. (Oct.)