The Hope diamond has a Zelig-like habit of surfacing in the most storied and fantastical chapters in history, including the first Western forays to India, the court of the Sun King at Versailles, and the gilded mansions of Jazz Age tycoons. Despite the plot devices of the film Titanic, however, the most famous jewel in the world did not ever board the most famous ship in the world. But it made good dramatic sense for Hollywood to suggest otherwise, because the Hope diamond (in the film, thinly disguised as “The Heart of the Ocean”) was in 1912 at the height of its uncanny powers, having by then accumulated a mythical force field of mysticism, power, and a tabloid-inflamed “curse.”

Hope: Adventures of a Diamond is a copious, unstinting work of popular scholarship, and a rousing tale of the flawless sapphire blue stone that holds “the secret of Creation itself.” Marian Fowler’s chronological approach to the material is well organized and richly detailed, and the book’s insights on changing values ascribed to the diamond – on how so many paid so much for a mere lump of mineral – are particularly strong.

Still, sometimes bad words happen to good books. Fowler uses a sort of ungainly theme-park narrative style throughout: “As it was being carried to the King and positioned to lie against the creamy cobwebs of his lace cravat, the stone caught the morning light streaming on that bright May morning through Versailles’ huge windows, and its rainbows danced.” This is fine, if rather Disneyesque, but soon the dippy sentences begin to pile up: “His Majesty’s gaping mouth was the only rounded form that Jeanne feared….” and “On we go, quickly past the Red House of a thief caught red-handed, sadly past a simple white dress become a shroud.”

Fowler also bizarrely attributes human feelings to the diamond: “the Diamond suffered further shame” and, deliriously, “For the Diamond, blueness had come.” Just as every appearance of Titanic’s clunky, undiamond-like Heart of the Ocean necklace struck a jarring note – for some critics, the kitsch trinket nearly capsized the film – Fowler’s language sinks an otherwise excellent story.