Overview

In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery. Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean--the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen--to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

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Reviews

"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 nail-biting intellectual and cultural adventure."" -- "" Times (London)"" ""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."" -- "" Guardian (London)"" ""Fox's achievement here is to make this fascinating tale accessible to a broader audience."" -- ""Washington Post"""

Author Information

Margalit Fox is a New York Times journalist originally trained as a linguist. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is also the author of Talking Hands. Margalit lives in Manhattan with her husband. Pam Ward has had many incarnations, including private detective, classical musician, television talk-show host, and actress, having performed in dinner theater, summer stock, and Off-Broadway, as well as in commercials, radio, and film. But she found her true calling reading books for the blind and physically handicapped for the Library of Congress Talking Books program, for which she received the prestigious Alexander Scourby Award from the American Foundation for the Blind. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, her many audiobooks include Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich, Breaking Free by Lauraine Snelling, The Second Journey by Joan Anderson, and Lion in the White House by Aida D. Donald. She now records from her studio amidst the beauty of the Southern Oregon mountains.

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