WGST 3450 Feminist Methodologies: Books

Shield begins with a...history of diamond mining, combining the story of the De Beers cartel, the role of Jews in the trade, and the part diamonds have played both in war and liberation. Succeeding chapters explore the evolving nature of both the global trade and the New York diamond district. Shield takes a close look at the increasingly complex ethnic makeup of the district, illuminates the rarely documented work done by women....

In 2000, Tom Zoellner purchased a diamond engagement ring and proposed. But his girlfriend walked out of his life making Tom the owner of a used engagement ring. He reacted by travelling to diamond mines in Africa, Canada, India, Brazil and Russia to discover the true worth of this gem. He gained entry to DeBeers, the London diamond merchants. He visited shopping mall jewelers. In his travels, he searched for an answer to the question "How has one stone created empires, ruined lives, inspired lust and emptied wallets?"

Kanfer shows the misery of black miners and the fortunes of white prospectors; the defeat of the African emperor Lobengula and the rise of Cecil Rhodes, who would rule both the Cape Colony and De Beers. In the 20th century, the Oppenheimers, a German-Jewish dynasty, builds De Beers into an empire with global reach, and creates a shadow government more flexible and powerful than South Africa's official leadership.

Hart...profiles the audacious young female geologist Eira Thomas who discovered near the Arctic Circle one of the richest diamond fields in the world. He...portrays the lives of the diamond cutters in India who have transformed the industry by making valuable the tiny stones once considered worthless. Diamonds also have their dark side. "Malfeasance rustles in the background...like a snake in dry grass," writes Hart...

This book describes the campaign that began in 1999 and which eventually forced the industry and more than 50 governments to create a global certification system aimed at wringing blood diamonds out of the retail trade. This gripping account concludes with a sobering assessment of the certification system, which soon became hostage to political chicanery, mismanagement and vested interests.

This book includes detailed case studies on arms smuggling, illegal transnational migration, the global diamond trade, borderland practices, and the transnational consumption of drugs. Its contributors urge us to distinguish between the illegal (prohibited by law) and the illicit (socially perceived as unacceptable), which are historically changeable and contested.

Southern Africa was once regarded as a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors found the world's richest deposits of diamonds, and then its richest deposits of gold. What followed was a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land, culminating in the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and in the devastation of the Boer republics.

With insight and drama, Oltuski limns her family's move from communist Siberia to a displaced persons camp in post-World War II Germany to New York's diamond district, exploring the connections among Jews and the industry, the gem and its lore, and the exotic citizens of New York's Diamond District. Entertaining and illuminating, Precious Objects offers an insider's look at the history, business, and society behind one of the world's most coveted natural resources.

In this updated edition of the classic work, Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "coffee crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs. Uncommon Grounds remains more than ever a brilliantly entertaining guide to one of the world's favorite beverages.

Jammed full of facts, figures, cartoons, and commentary, this book covers coffee from its first use in Ethiopia in the six century A.D. to the dramatic rise of Starbucks and other specialty retailers in the 1990s.

Weissman treks into the paradoxical realm of specialty coffee. Her guides are coffee business hotshots. With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America-a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist's pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers.

An entertaining but critical discussion of the ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and culture of coffee. * Matt Lounsbury of pioneering business Stumptown Coffee discusses just how good coffee can be * Caffeine-related chapters cover the ethics of the coffee trade, the metaphysics of coffee and the centrality of the coffee house to the public sphere.

From the coffee producers and pickers who tend the plantations in tropical nations, to the middlemen and processors, to the consumers who drink coffee without ever having to think about how the drink reached their hands, here is a commodity that ties the world together. 

An Atlantic correspondent uncovers the true cost-in economic, political, and psychic terms-of our penchant for making and buying things as cheaply as possible From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt-and almost everywhere in between-America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price.

Morton Satin traces the rich and intriguing history of coffee, showing how coffee consumption evolved to fit the social and economic needs of different times. The author even goes on to reveal the best techniques for home brewing.