Reviewed by Suzi Steffen

"The stones are still mined under some of the most miserable conditions imaginable," Tom Zoellner says about two thirds of the way through his book, "the diamond that goes on to sparkle on the left hand of a bride on a country club dance floor in Minnesota may once have been pulled from the lower intestine of a slain Congolese miner like a pearl out of an oyster."

Zoellner marshals facts about the diamond trade from Canada to Thailand to Australia to Angola and, finally, back to the U.S., and only rarely intercedes with interpretations.   Without attempting to proscribe behavior, Zoellner's details and scenes make such a compelling case about the blood (and, literally, guts) associated with the diamond trade that readers should be hard-pressed to buy into the suddenly less-than-convincing idea that every engaged woman must have a diamond.

Zoellner combines a slight personal tale — of the ring his former fiancée returned to him, and its fate — with stories of research, derring-do, and greed on a massively exploitative scale. The pacing sometimes seems off and the stories of the people Zoellner meets a bit too foreshortened in a kind of breathless literary journalism shorthand, but this book belongs on the must-read list of anyone contemplating shelling out hard-earned cash for a gem that can never again look clean.