“Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense. . . . This one deserves shelf space along such classics of the genre as Simon Singh’s The Code Book .” — Booklist (starred review)
“A fascinating yarn centered around an unlikely heroine. . . . Fox’s deft explanations of the script-solving process allow readers to share in the mental detective work of cracking the lost language.” — Publishers Weekly
“Fox recreates the emergence of one of history’s most vexing puzzles—and then puts readers alongside the remarkable figures who, brilliantly, obsessively, and even tragically, devoted their lives to solving it. Forget the Da Vinci Code . This is the real thing.” — Toby Lester, author of Da Vinci's Ghost
“Margalit Fox describes the decipherment of Linear B in such lucid detail that any reader can follow the steps and participate in the thrill of discovery.” — Stephen Mitchell, translator of Gilgamesh and the Iliad
“Fox’s achievement here is to make this fascinating tale accessible to a broader audience.” — Washington Post
“… a nail-biting intellectual and cultural adventure.” — The Times UK
“Deft, sharply written … Fox’s account runs with the pace and tension of a detective story - and has much to say about language and writing systems along the way.” — The Guardian UK
“[Fox] … has cracked it, fashioning an intellectual puzzle into an engrossing detective story of driven personalities, hidden clues, perseverance and intuition. In the process, she has uncovered a remarkable woman who had been buried by history.” — Sunday Times UK
“As with any good detective story, there’s a driving narrative behind the puzzle, peopled by solitary sleuths.” — The Guardian US
Margalit Fox describes the decipherment of Linear B in such lucid detail that any reader can follow the steps and participate in the thrill of discovery.
… a nail-biting intellectual and cultural adventure.
Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense. . . . This one deserves shelf space along such classics of the genre as Simon Singh’s The Code Book .
Booklist (starred review)
Fox’s achievement here is to make this fascinating tale accessible to a broader audience.
In Margalit Fox's…The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Sherlock Holmes makes several cameo appearances, and for good reason. In Fox, the story has found a worthy Conan Doyle. In the best detective stories, the mysteries of human character are as compelling as the enigmatic clues, and as central to the plot, which explains why Fox structures her book as a triptych of biographies…But it's the figure in the middle panel, an unknown chain-smoking classicist from Brooklyn named Alice Kober, who is the hero of the story as Fox tells it, and it's Fox's portrait of Kober that is her book's greatest contribution.
The New York Times Book Review - Donovan Hohn
…by retrieving a woman who might otherwise have vanished, [Ms. Fox] ends up performing an act of historical redemption akin to the one her subject accomplished. The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a gripping and tightly focused scholarly mystery informed by the author's own knowledge of linguistics, recounts the story of Linear B through three people who fell under its spell…In explaining the problem and eventual solution, Ms. Fox makes the complexities of linguistic scholarship accessible, weaving observations about language into the stories of her primary characters…
The New York Times - Matti Friedman
Linguist and New York Times senior writer Fox spins a fascinating yarn centered around an unlikely heroine: a devoted academic spinster who died before accomplishing her life’s mission of cracking an ancient script. In 1900, aristocratic archaeologist Arthur J. Evans put his “tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and myopia” to work in excavating Knossos, where Linear B—the script in question—was discovered on clay tablets in the ruins of a Cretan palace. Architect Michael Ventris eventually completed the decipherment of the language, having built off the work of Alice Kober, the languages professor at the heart of the tale. Working at her kitchen table in the 1940s, hand-cutting over 150,000 cards to systematically catalogue Linear B, Kober and her “passion... for the life of the mind” historically have been overshadowed by the two more famous men who bookended her endeavors. Fox’s deft explanations of the script-solving process—complete with supplemental photos and illustrations of the text—allow readers to share in the mental detective work of cracking the lost language. Ultimately, the revelation here is the enduring nature of writing as an expression of humanity, a message passed not through content, but through the act of interpretation and the passionate endeavor to understand. Photos & illus. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman, Inc. (May 14)
[Fox] … has cracked it, fashioning an intellectual puzzle into an engrossing detective story of driven personalities, hidden clues, perseverance and intuition. In the process, she has uncovered a remarkable woman who had been buried by history.
As with any good detective story, there’s a driving narrative behind the puzzle, peopled by solitary sleuths.
Deft, sharply written … Fox’s account runs with the pace and tension of a detective story - and has much to say about language and writing systems along the way.
Fox recreates the emergence of one of history’s most vexing puzzles—and then puts readers alongside the remarkable figures who, brilliantly, obsessively, and even tragically, devoted their lives to solving it. Forget the Da Vinci Code . This is the real thing.
Fox’s achievement here is to make this fascinating tale accessible to a broader audience.
"Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense. . . . This one deserves shelf space along such classics of the genre as Simon Singh’s The Code Book."
Linear B is a script first found on clay tablets excavated on the island of Crete and later at Pylos on the Greek mainland and dating to the Mycenaean period, circa 1400 BCE. The story of its decipherment by Michael Ventris (1922–56) has already been told, e.g., in John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B (1958), and in Andrew Robinson's The Man Who Deciphered Linear B (2002). Now Fox (senior writer, New York Times; Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind), a trained linguist, brings to the fore the groundbreaking work of American classical scholar Alice Kober (1906–50) whose syllabic grids made Ventris's breakthrough possible. Fox starts with the story of "The Digger," Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941), the British archaeologist who excavated the first tablets on Crete and made the first attempts to decode them. The reader then meets Kober, whom Fox dubs "The Detective" for her discovery of the syllabic nature of the script. Kober's work enabled "The Architect" Ventris to identify the texts as archaic Greek. Fox totally engages the reader in the decipherment process and summarizes the content of the tablets: primarily inventory records of people and produce. VERDICT This exciting linguistic adventure, intended for the nonspecialist, is recommended to anyone interested in archaeological mysteries—and even to crossword puzzle enthusiasts!—Edward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL
Narrator Pam Ward recounts the story of the scholars who dedicated themselves to deciphering Linear B, an ancient language discovered on a series of inscribed tablets on the island of Crete. Ward's reading is well paced, and her vocal variation helps to hold the listener's attention as she describes the finer points of linguistic analysis. She also creates biographical portraits of the scholars who worked on the study of the tablets. Ward makes frequent references to the PDF companion illustrations available through the publisher's website. Without these, the audiobook would be difficult to understand, given the text's emphasis on the deciphering of ancient linguistic inscriptions. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2013 - AudioFile
