Wise's captivating epic follows Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's life-long adventures in the gem trade and grand romance with Madeleine de Goisse, the bastard daughter of a French courtesan and a Persian king.
“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.
*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).
In an era when ladies were demure and men courtly, one priceless treasure set England ablaze and incited unimaginable scandal and passion—the Hope Diamond. Heir to an impressive title and fortune, Lord William Townshend, Earl of Harclay, is among the most disreputable rakes in England. Desperately bored by dull heiresses and tedious soirees, he seeks new excitement—with a dangerous scheme to steal the world’s most legendary gemstone from its owner, Thomas Hope. To his surprise, however, it’s not the robbery that sets his blood burning but the alluring lady from whom he pilfers the gem. A string of bad luck has left the fate of Lady Violet Rutledge’s estate entirely in Hope’s scheming hands. So when his prized jewel disappears from around her neck, she has no choice but to track down the villain responsible for the theft. Only Harclay has his sights set on taking more from her than the necklace—and she’s tempted to surrender anything he desires… Now, caught in a thrilling game of secrecy and seduction, Violet must find a way to protect her fortune—and her heart—before she loses both forever…
The French entered the Pacific in the late 17th century, but the ocean remained largely a Spanish preserve until British navigators began to cross its vast expanse in the mid 1760s. France's concerns that Britain might establish its superiority in the area, meant they welcomed Louis de Bougainville's voyage of exploration undertaken in 1766-9. After handing over the colony he had established in the Falkland Islands to Spain, he sailed through the still relatively unknown Straits of Magellan into the poorly charted South Pacific. He made a number of discoveries in the south west, but was too late to discover Tahiti, where Samuel Wallis had preceded him by less than a year. Reports on Bougainville's reception there and on life in the island were to create wide interest and controversy in Europe. He then sailed to the Samoan Islands and on to Vanuatu, as far as the Great Barrier Reef, and north towards New Guinea and the Samoan Islands making a number of discoveries and all the while leaving his name to a number of features, the best known of which are the island of Bougainville and the Bougainvillea flower. He returned home by way of the Dutch East Indies and the Indian Ocean. Although Bougainville published an account of his voyage in 1771, his original journal was published only in 1977; the present volume makes the latter text available for the first time in English translation.
The Tour de France is still very much a men's only bicycle race but that didn't stop this amateur cyclist from pursuing her dream of riding all 21 stages of the famous course one week before the professional peloton. She set off to discover the beauty of a country and sport that she loves and ended up discovering more about herself in the process
With linked hands, the human circle perambulated, moving to the left in the precise step sequences that had been the format through centuries of performance. Last Sardana begins the story of a mother, Maria Martinez, and 12-year-old son Pedro, with modest beginnings in Rosas, a Spanish Costa Brava fishing village. Set in the fifties, Maria was widowed by a tragic disaster at sea. Together they uproot south to be under the wing of her brother-in-law, who is developing an hotel on the Martinez family land. Maria and Pedro, in their separate ways, become pivotal to that. There Pedro is exposed to the ‘University of Life’ through adolescence itself. His creative talent is encouraged and exposed, as are the challenges of a veritable fan club of contemporary girlfriends, discovering their own emotions and playing with his. Diverse characters comprising the initial hotel clientele enter his life, as do a field of sunflowers and a deaf, mute boy whose great artistic talents Peter discovers, to take into the future. Maria finds new and exciting love too...
A witch-friendly guide to working magic with gemstones and crystals. The energy contained within stones is a mysterious and invisible power as old as the earth itself. It is also an energy that, when properly harnessed, can enable a person to create powerful magic and reconnect with energies that animate the natural world. Gemstone and Crystal Magic is a practical and comprehensive guide to the magical world of crystals and gemstones, including both precious and semiprecious stones. Written by a modern witch with firsthand knowledge of the occult properties of stones, this book is filled with numerous spells and rituals, folklore, and magical correspondences. It also explores gemstone curses and cures, and the many ways in which gemstones can be utilized as amulets for magical workings, as oracles for revealing the future, and as tools for healing one's body, mind, and spirit. With the aid of this book, you will learn how to properly cleanse and charge stones, and also how to make homemade gemstone elixirs. Additionally, you will discover the secrets of using stones to increase your wealth, facilitate clairvoyant abilities, invoke deities, ward off bad luck and evil influences, draw love into your life, and so much more. This book was previously published as Dunwich's Guide to Gemstone Sorcery: Using Stones for Spells, Amulets, Rituals, and Divination by New Page Books in 2003.