Diamond Stories

Renée Rose Shield is Clinical Associate Professor of Community Health at Brown University. She is the author of Uneasy Endings: Daily Life in an American Nursing Home, also from Cornell, and coauthor of Aging in Today's World: Conversations between an Anthropologist and a Physician.

Shield has done an excellent job revealing the hidden world of the diamond trade.... Anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the diamond world will find themselves satisfied.- Rabbi Rachel Esserman (The Reporter) Diamond Stories is the best view of the cloistered world of New York's Jewish diamond community that anyone has ever set down in print. The author captures the trading environment, the negotiation rituals, and the sardonic wit and 'folklore' with a sympathetic insider's view and without the stereotypes and clichés to which others have fallen prey. Throughout the book, she relates how diamond dealers admonished her to 'get the tone right.' That she has done very well.- Russell Shor, Gemological Institute of America (Gems and Gemology) Markets... dominate the global economy. In fact, much of the recent Internet Revolution was built on the notion of creating new markets... where everything from steel to freelance services could be traded. Then there's the diamond market, a complex yet loosely structured system that's part souk, part multibillion-dollar global exchange. This curious blend is what makes Diamond Stories such an engrossing read.... While Shield is an anthropologist by training, Diamond Stories is more a well-told tale than a scholarly book.- Robert Rosenberg (Business Week) New York's diamond business is an insular world. Yet thanks to introductions from relatives in the business, anthropologist Shield gained access to the industry's inner sanctum: West 47th Street in Manhattan.... This modest, accessible if somewhat academic volume... covers a lot of ground.... The book offers a window into an enigmatic sector of society that, as Shield ably portrays, balances on the cusp between the traditional and the modern.(Publishers Weekly) Renée interviewed diamond dealers, brokers, and manufacturers (the majority of them Orthodox or Hasidic Jews), and then merged her findings with anthropological observations.- Toby Rossner (East Side Marketplace) Thanking Uncles Moishe and Shmiel is more than a scholar's nod to family forbearance in Diamond Stories. For Renee Rose Shield... her uncles were her ethnographic entree. Their good names and many decades in New York's diamond trade gave her access to the inner sancta of the midtown industry.- Nina C. Ayoub (Chronicle of Higher Education)