12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reviewed in the Independent as "enthralling" and "brilliant!, July 7, 2004
By A Customer
A glittering account of the diamond trade
This review was in The Independent newspaper in the UK on May 22nd. It is by Boyd Tonkin. I think it one of the best.
"After Disney apparently refused to handle Michael Moore's celluloid polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11, the row over market censorship rumbled long and loud. That's America - and Hollywood - pundits over here might say. In Britain, and in the book world, we take such liberty for granted.
We can't, of course. Publishers' fear of libel suits - in particular, of "libel tourism" by foreign claimants - acts as an often-invisible brake on controversy. Mostly, it inhibits not vapid tittle-tattle about private lives but serious reportage. Take Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, acclaimed in the US for a careful exposure of the close ties between the two first families. Here, Secker & Warburg announced the book but then failed to release it. In other cases, news of the suppression of books may emerge very late, or not at all. Thanks to an intrepid US firm, an extraordinary example has just come to light.
Disinformation, a New York outfit, has issued a formidably well-researched and widely-sourced account of the global diamond trade by the Australian-based investigative journalist Janine Roberts. It strikes this lay reader as one of the most dogged and damning exposés of a near-monopolistic industry to appear in years. The greater wonder is that it has appeared at all.
Roberts first began to unearth the stories of diamond miners and traders while reporting a clash between Aboriginal people and prospectors more than 20 years ago. The project meant, above all, following the trail of De Beers. In Africa, De Beers still mines "about 45 per cent by value of the total annual global diamond production". Through its selling arm, the Diamond Trading Company, it "markets some two-thirds of global supply". In partnership with the luxury-goods group LVMH, it is currently looking for new ways "to exploit the value of its brand". The quoted phrases don't come from Roberts's enthralling and alarming history of the company's activities. They appear on the official De Beers website.
Glitter and Greed records two decades of hair-raising research in Africa, Australia and India. It explores with - if anything - a surfeit of documentation the tangled links between diamond trading, civil strife, child labour and semi-slavery. As Roberts writes, "When Princess Diana met with Angolan land-mine victims, she met victims of the proceeds of diamond sales".
Many of Roberts's discoveries entered the public domain in a two-part BBC documentary, The Diamond Empire, screened (with cuts) in 1994. By that stage, she had also completed a book. Doubleday's reader called it "sensational, well-documented and very controversial". Too much so, it seems: the investigation featured in the catalogue but never appeared. Later, Little, Brown declined to publish, hoping that Roberts could find a "less cowardly" home. Now she has.
Fully updated, Glitter and Greed traces the radical overhaul in the diamond industry's image and practice over the past five years. De Beers itself now stands in the forefront of the campaign against "conflict diamonds" sold to fund civil war. Roberts follows the refinement of the "Kimberley Process" designed to certify that the rocks on your ring come from a clean source. She decides, with a wealth of evidence, that a "Kimberley" stone offers no guarantee that the diamond "will not have been cut illegally by a child" or "mined by a miner breathing asbestos dust". As a feat of investigation, her complex but gripping book for once merits that tarnished plaudit, "brilliant". As for the performance of British publishers faced with its revelations - "lacklustre" would be kind. "
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27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting... but deeply flawed, August 23, 2004
I hesitate to give this book such a poor rating, because it's significantly better than the other accounts I've read and the facts need to be heard. But, following the all-too-familiar trend of the modern "factual account", it's poorly written and presents its case in a rather slapdash fashion.
While I have no doubt that the basic story (DeBeers' blatant manipulation of diamond prices, dangerous working conditions in diamond mines, and rampant trade in "blood diamonds") is accurate to some degree, it's a challenge to find anything resembling specific claims with definite proof. The book reminds me more of a "20/20 expose" than a careful, verifiable and accurate telling. Random photographs scattered throughout the text (of such fascinating subjects as outside entrances to mine workers' quarters) do little to improve this impression. Worse, there are a few "side subjects" (such as a discussion of synthetic diamonds) that contain obvious inaccuracies.
There's an interesting and vital story here, and Roberts is to be commended for presenting it in the face of a cartel with billions of dollars at stake and no compunction to "play fair". (Compare Roberts' relatively hard-hitting story to Michael Hart's ambivalent, yet very probably DeBeers-approved, "Diamond".) If the appendix describing her difficulties in getting her film aired is to be believed, there's more than a little "funny business" going on.
But... it's such a fascinating story that it doesn't need the journalistic excess that permeates this book. A sober and straightforward account would've been more convincing and ultimately more helpful.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, April 9, 2004
This is about the best and most up to date record of the offensive cartel that is De Beers. Roberts details pretty much everything I have learned in the last six years as a synthetic diamond grower. There is some seriosuly good investigative journalism in this text, only let down by the diamond growth chapter - but hey, she isn't a scientist one doesn't expect perfection. However, it would have been nice if she cited Hazen's "The Diamond Makers", especially since the person who she credits with the first man made synthesis of diamond is largely thought of as having only grown silicon carbide (relatively easy to confuse the two on hardness at least).
Roberts maages to gain access to some places thought untouchable such as the De Beers mines, and it is depressing to find that everything you hear on the grapevine is basically true. This industry is hard to fathom at the best of times, with the corruption and unethical treatment of human beings.
Worse still is the wool being pulled over the consumers eyes over conflict diamonds, exploiting the progession of consumer conscience. This is horrible and there needs to be some real action from the UN, rather than getting into bed with the problem!
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