This review was originally published on NetGalley.com. I was given an ebook freely by NetGalley and the book’s publisher in return for a voluntary and honest review. An absolute feast for the senses, the book itself feels very much like a collector’s treasure hoarded wunderkammer of mythic and mysterious curiosities. It is split into six sections (Stones and Power, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stone, and Living Stones), and each section reveals a chapter devoted to unearthing an individual stone with imaginative, artful descriptions and a pretty wild, or wildly fascinating story connected to each stone. For too long, artists have been told that they can't have both motherhood and a successful career. In this polemical volume, critic and campaigner Hettie Judah argues that a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers (and other parents: artist fathers, parents who don't identify with the term 'mother', and parents in other sectors of the art world). Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, Lapidarium builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond.

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones - Goodreads Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones - Goodreads

A gem of a collection [...] a highly accessible guide delivered in a light, informative tone. Quietly authoritative, the author sustains our attention through the pithiness of her essays and the verve of her storytelling" Geology is a story-telling science, requiring great leaps of poetic imagination,’ writes Hettie Judah in Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones. Stones that come to us hard and cold and unchanging are the product of immense geological heat and upheaval. They provide glimpses into the inhuman abyss of time and are windows onto past epochs. And stones and minerals underpin every part of every civilisation, explaining and revealing, showing that the pinnacles of wealth, luxury and artistic achievement are often allied to misery, despoliation and violence. Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, this book is a beautifully designed collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history

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Whitby and the surrounding area also come under the spotlight as Judah follows the fortunes of the Alum trade and its importance to the British textile and fashion industries. “Forged by the landscape”

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah

Amongst these essays exploring how human culture has formed stone and, conversely, the roles stone has played in forming human culture, one will read of the Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan, a piece of banded jasper that resembles a tender piece of mouth-watering braised pork belly, There is the soap opera melodrama of Pele’s Hair, golden strands of volcanic glass, spun into hair-fine threads by volcanic gasses and blown across the landscape. And not to mention the hysterical metaphysical WTFery of angel-appointed wife swaps in the chapter of alchemist and astrologer John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm, as well as, the mystical modern-day TikTik moldavite craze vibing amongst those of the witchy-psychic persuasion. I cannot even tell you how many times I paused in my reading to open a new Google tab and research, thinking, “holy fake crystal skulls/malachite caskets/pyroclastic flow rap lyrics! I gotta learn more about this!” The Stone of Scone, our Stone of Destiny (soon to re-appear in the headlines given its supposed journey to London for King Charles’s coronation) turns out to be another piece of Old Red Sandstone after scientists had it analysed as recently as 1998. Judah is an amazing writer. She weaves stone through human history showing us how we gave different types of stone the power of royalty and worship. She breaks down the history of each individual stone and how it’s impacted the human race through history. We interweave them in our mythology. They become a medium for our artwork generation after generation. Our advancement as a species came about by forging stone tools even now the Industrial Revolution was possible because of coal. Whitby jet, imbued with the spirit of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, inspires tales of male priests who cut off their own genitalia to identify as women, 1982 excavations at Cataractonium – a third-century Roman military base on the River Swale, climate change in the Lower Jurassic period, promiscuous women simulating states of virginity, and warding off snakes. A collection of extravagant stories about artists, miners, princes, chancers, criminals – and above all collectors [...] a real cabinet of curiosities"The moody millstone grit looming over those West Yorkshire moorlands, reshaped by centuries of savage winds and harsh rains, but as abrasive and tough as ever, provides reference to one of the county’s most famous authors, forged by the landscape into which she was born. In a forward to Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, just a year before her death, her sister Charlotte pictured Emily as a sculptor chiselling the novel ‘hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials… its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it’, and the poet Anne Carson relates to that same abrasive stone texture in terms of her father’s memory fractured through Alzheimer’s;