The Heartless Stone: A Journey through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire
By Tom Zoellner, 294 pp., publ. by St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006. US$24.95

Reviewed by Russell Shor

The mystique and value of diamonds is a double-edged sword, inspiring the passions that help fuel an industry with $65 billion in worldwide sales while engendering a great number of myths and not-so-noble emotions. Like several other mainstream books about diamonds, The Heartless Stone offers a pastiche of history, myth, assumption, fact, and misinformation into an engagingly written stew. The book describes diamond mining in Canada, Brazil, Angola, and Russia; provides an overview of “The Cartel” (the De Beers Diamond Trading Company); and examines diamond cutting in India as well as consumer markets of the U.S. and Japan. Unfortunately, much of this information is inaccurate.

Typical of how information is presented in this book is the first chapter, in which the author juxtaposes his own ill-fated engagement and the diamond that sealed it with the history of the Central African Republic (CAR). He recounts the sociopolitical troubles of the CAR from its French colonial past through the reign of Emperor Bokassa in the 1970s and ’80s, in the process maintaining that the republic is part of the “conflict diamonds” trade. Zoellner’s choice of the CAR as an example is odd, given that the country, while governed badly, has not experienced widespread conflict or civil war. Nor has it ever been named by the United Nations, Kimberley Process, or any nongovernmental organization as a source of conflict diamonds—its economy, for the most part, is sustained by foreign aid.

Even more problematic is his statement that conflict diamonds comprise 14% of the stones in the market. In reality, at the peak of the Angolan and Sierra Leone civil wars, conflict diamonds represented between 4% and 5% of all diamonds in the market. Illicitly traded diamonds, those smuggled or under declared to avoid taxes, made up an estimated 14% before the 2003 Kimberley Process forced accountability.

In the chapter on the U.S. diamond market, titled “The Big Nothing,” the author states that the markup on diamond engagement rings and other diamond jewelry “is nothing short of outrageous,” adding that the term keystone was developed “several years ago” as a euphemism to disguise this fact. Of course, keystone has been in use for many decades, and retail jewelry profit margins are in fact in line with those of similar consumer products such as apparel and sporting goods. Mall jewelers, Zoellner says, “have the power to foist some of the worst deals onto the consumer thanks to their mammoth volumes,” failing to note that those same jewelers typically pay 5–6% assessments on gross sales as part of their mall lease agreements. Zoellner does discuss the impact of the Internet but fails to note how deeply it has cut into the margins on diamond solitaires.

The chapter on India, “The Stone Mills,” asserts on page 213 that children constitute 10% of the workforce in the country’s diamond industry, citing a 1997 statement from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions—which at the time represented the Belgian diamond workers’ unions in bargaining for benefits in the face of Indian competition. Four pages later, however, Zoellner credits the same source for a statement that “20% of India’s [diamond] workers were underage.” In reality, an independent survey of India’s diamond labor force conducted by Ferguson Associates in 2003 found that less than 3% of India’s diamond workers were under 15 years old, and many of these were apprentices of family-run businesses. The author also fails to point out that the great majority of India’s diamond workers earn wages well above the national average, and that in recent years Surat has made a dramatic transformation from one of the most poverty-stricken cities in India to a center of budding prosperity (as a recent visit by this reviewer attests).

Old myths long established as apocryphal, such as the “Belgian” (Asscher was Dutch) who cleaved the Cullinan diamond fainting after he struck the first blow (there is no evidence this occurred), are presented as fact. At the same time, newer myths, such as De Beers crushing the attempt to develop the Crater of Diamonds deposit in Arkansas into a viable mine, are given new life. On the latter, Zoellner spends pages

discussing the alleged potential of the “kimberlite” (actually lamproite) deposits at Murfreesboro despite extensive bulk sampling performed in the late 1990s by the state of Arkansas (which he dismisses as a few “core samples”) that clearly established the deposit as uneconomic (about 1.1 ct/100 tonne at $12.30/ct; see D. P. Dunne, “Diamond economics of the Prairie Creek lamproite, Murfreesboro, AR, USA,” Ore Geology Reviews, Vol. 22, No. 3-4, 2003, pp. 251–262).

No one disputes that conflict diamonds remain an issue today: Even at less than 1% they are too numerous. And certainly not every diamond worker in India finds prosperity and not every consumer in the U.S. gets a great deal on a diamond. But these facts must be considered against the whole picture, which was not offered here. The tragedy of this book is that, like his literary predecessors Edward Jay Epstein, Matthew Hart, and Janine Roberts, Zoellner possesses the skill and drive to produce a work that could have lasting value, but instead chose to perpetuate misinformation.

Russell Shor is senior industry analyst at the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad, California.