Pearls: A Natural History

Rating:
Summary: Most excellent information, but...
Review: This book is quite thorough, as mentioned in the other reviews. The "but" is major, though.... The type font is VERY DIFFICULT on the eyes. I absolutely love pearls, drool over them, even. I gobble up any information on them. If the GIA offers a specialization in them, I will get it. But the lines in this font are so thin, and the size is so tight and small, I haven't been able to finish a fourth of the book, and I've had it over a year!

Every time I try to read it, I have to put it down after only a few pages. By the way, my vision is great, corrected to better than 20/20. Perhaps my copy (bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art store) was printed when the ink source was running low...

Rating:
Summary: Most excellent information, but...
Review: This book is quite thorough, as mentioned in the other reviews. The "but" is major, though.... The type font is VERY DIFFICULT on the eyes. I absolutely love pearls, drool over them, even. I gobble up any information on them. If the GIA offers a specialization in them, I will get it. But the lines in this font are so thin, and the size is so tight and small, I haven't been able to finish a fourth of the book, and I've had it over a year!

Every time I try to read it, I have to put it down after only a few pages. By the way, my vision is great, corrected to better than 20/20. Perhaps my copy (bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art store) was printed when the ink source was running low...

Rating:
Summary: contains everything you could want to know
Review: This is an excellent, well illustrated book with everything you could want to know about pearls - how they occur naturally, the biology of this, how they are induced artificially ( cultured pearls), how they are faked, the optics of their appearance and how they have shaped history and , of course, pearl jewellery.

The hard bits are explained without jargon, in intelligeable words but without losing detail.

Rating:
Summary: Pearls before swine...
Review: This truly is a history book, written in a very accessable style with lots of great photos and illustrations. If there's anything else to know about pearls then I suspect it might just about fill up the back of a postage stamp with room to spare. A great resource for amateurs and professionals alike; I thoroughly enjoyed it and it's well worth the money.