en-US Wed, 24 Feb 2021 12:27:40 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 55662724 The astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who joined together to pull off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prison camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around camp, and one day, a Turkish officer approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board--and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception--to build a trap for the Turkish officers that will ultimately lead them to freedom.

The Confidence Men is the story of the only known con game played for a good cause--and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for "the Great War," Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic from an Australian sheep farm, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives.

Margalit Fox brings her "nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality" (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this gripping tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.]]> 352 Margalit Fox 1788162714 Margalit 0
FYI, I've created a hashtag for the book on social media: #FoxConfidenceMen

With warmest wishes,

Margo]]> 3.88 2021
author: Margalit Fox
name: Margalit
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/24
shelves:
review:
Thank you so much, everyone, for the lovely advance reviews of THE CONFIDENCE MEN so far. I'm thrilled that you find this remarkable true story as compelling as I did.

FYI, I've created a hashtag for the book on social media: #FoxConfidenceMen

With warmest wishes,

Margo
]]> 36978075 In this thrilling true-crime procedural, the creator of Sherlock Holmes uses his unparalleled detective skills to exonerate a German Jew wrongly convicted of murder.

One of USA Today's "Five new books you won't want to miss!"

"Gripping . . . The book works on two levels, much like a good Holmes case."--Time

For all the scores of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in the world, there is no recent book that tells this remarkable story--in which Conan Doyle becomes a real-life detective on an actual murder case. In Conan Doyle for the Defense, Margalit Fox takes us step by step inside Conan Doyle's investigative process and illuminates a murder mystery that is also a morality play for our time--a story of ethnic, religious, and anti-immigrant bias.

In 1908, a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home. The police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater--an immigrant Jewish cardsharp--who, despite his obvious innocence, was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor in a brutal Scottish prison. Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. Using the methods of his most famous character, he scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness statements, meticulously noting myriad holes, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications by police and prosecutors. Finally, in 1927, his work won Slater's freedom.

Margalit Fox, a celebrated longtime writer for The New York Times, has "a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality" (Kathryn Schulz, New York). In Conan Doyle for the Defense, she immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in the history of forensics, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.

Praise for Conan Doyle for the Defense

"Splendid . . . The ingredients are too good to pass up: a famous detective novelist actually playing detective, a man serving time for a murder he did not commit, and a criminal justice system slowly, and reluctantly, reckoning with the advent of forensic science." -- Sarah Weinman, The New Republic

"Entertaining."--Newsday ]]> 352 Margalit Fox 0399589457 Margalit 0 3.69 2018
author: Margalit Fox
name: Margalit
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 16240783 363 Margalit Fox 0062228838 Margalit 0 my-rooting-interest
‘The Riddle of the Labyrinth,� by Margalit Fox
By MATTI FRIEDMAN
Published: May 30, 2013

The events of the past grow more alien as our distance from them increases, receding until they become, finally, unknowable. Unknowable, that is, but for those who take it upon themselves to decode the symbols, to examine what others see as indecipherable or unimportant, to sift a story from the chaff and to resurrect names, places, actions and ideas that would otherwise be lost.

Alice Kober, the subject of Margalit Fox’s new book, was one such scholar. A classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and �40s, she played a key role in solving one of the 20th century’s great academic riddles: how to read a 3,400-year-old script known as Linear B, unearthed amid the ruins of the Minoan civilization of Crete, the mythic home of the labyrinth of Daedalus and the Minotaur.

Kober deserves much of the credit for “one of the most prodigious intellectual feats of modern times,� Ms. Fox writes. Yet after Kober’s death in 1950, she was promptly forgotten.

Ms. Fox, an obituary writer at The New York Times, set out to rectify this, and by retrieving a woman who might otherwise have vanished, she 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. The first is Arthur Evans, the renowned adventurer and archaeologist who, digging on Crete in 1900, discovered clay tablets with an unknown script. It was written with linear strokes, rather than with Egyptian-style hieroglyphs or the cuneiform wedges of Mesopotamia, so he called it Linear B. (An earlier script unearthed at the site was named Linear A.)

Evans was that particular type of Englishman who would say of an attempt by ruffians to assassinate him, “People seem excited about it, but what is certain is that I was not.� He had a low opinion of “inferior races� and might have brought some of that baggage to his linguistic analysis. The script, he thought, belonged to a superior civilization, and the enigmatic symbols seemed to him to have a “free, upright European character.� Back at his mansion near Oxford, replete with models of Minoan thrones and a mosaic of the Minotaur, he tried for decades to decode these symbols but didn’t come close.

A second Englishman, Michael Ventris, a brilliant and fragile architect and amateur linguist, began trying to crack the code after encountering Evans and his tablets on a school trip in 1936, when he was 14. Working at the same time as Kober and using some of her methods and observations, he finally succeeded just before his 30th birthday.

Both men achieved fame in their lifetime, but Ms. Fox makes a case for Kober, the “unprepossessing� daughter of Hungarian immigrants, as the story’s hero. Her thick glasses, unstylish hair and prim mouth belied the “snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method,� Ms. Fox writes. Kober dedicated her life to solving the riddle, laboring at her dining table in Brooklyn, “ever-present cigarette at hand.� She never married, and her extensive correspondence, we learn, contains a total of two mentions of a social life.

There was hardly time. To aid her quest, she learned Chinese, Akkadian, Persian, Hittite and Basque, among other tongues, and eventually prepared no fewer than 180,000 index cards as she struggled to develop a system that would allow her to crack what Ms. Fox calls a “locked-room mystery� � deciphering an unknown script that an unknown society used to write an unknown language. A Linear B scholar was operating in a “linguistic terra incognita with neither map nor compass at hand.� Without a guide like the Rosetta stone (the multilingual inscription that finally allowed scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs) the task was thought to be all but impossible.

That it turned out not to be is a testament to what the human brain, or at least the rare human brain, is capable of. 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, two of whom met tragic and untimely ends.

When the code was finally cracked, the result did not immediately appear equal to the intensity of the pursuit; if the archaeologists on Crete had hoped to find the Minoan equivalent of the Library of Congress, instead they seem to have unearthed the offices of the I.R.S.

But even bureaucracy has its poetry; thanks to the decoded script, we are introduced to an island where people worshiped familiar gods like Poseidon alongside intriguing ones like the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and where folks were walking around with names like Gladly Welcome, Snub-Nosed and � here’s the guy who must have been the life of Knossos back in the day � Having the Bottom Bare.

Ms. Fox is attentive to touching traces of idiosyncratic humanity, past and ancient: The church pamphlets and library slips Kober cut up to serve as index cards during the paper shortages of World War II; the “scribal doodles� � a bull, a man, a maze � found on the tablets; the mark a Cretan scribe made when erasing a character on wet clay with his thumb all those centuries ago. “To look at the tablets even now is to be in the presence of other people � living, thinking, literate people,� she writes.

“The Riddle of the Labyrinth� leaves one pondering what traces will stand as remains of the present, when there is no longer physical correspondence and much of a scholar’s work exists nowhere but in digital form � that is to say, nowhere.

It’s quite possible that our records will be as inaccessible a century from now as those of the ancient Minoans were to the language detectives in this book. Figuring out who we were and what we thought � should anyone deem that worthwhile � might make decoding Linear B look easy.

Matti Friedman is the author of “The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books� (Algonquin).
A version of this review appeared in print on May 31, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Brooklyn Breaker of Ancient Codes.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 31, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Brooklyn Breaker of Ancient Codes.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A RAVE REVIEW FROM NEW YORK MAGAZINE:
5/16/13 at 5:15 PM

By Kathryn Schulz

Viewed in a certain light, the thousands of inscribed clay tablets unearthed over the past century on Crete and mainland Greece are profoundly boring. Essentially the scattered files of an early civilization’s accounting department, the tablets list rations of wheat and figs, record the results of the local census, and keep track of broken versus unbroken chariot wheels. Fully 800 of them are, as Margalit Fox writes in her new book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, “quite literally devoted to counting sheep.� In short, they are not the world’s most fascinating reading material. But for a long time after their discovery that didn’t matter, because no one had any idea at all how to read them.

What does make for fascinating reading is Fox’s book, which recounts the 50-year quest to decipher Linear B, the writing on those tablets. A few chapters in, I found myself thinking about a specific and unusual form of literary pleasure: that of seeing one’s own pet subjects reflected in a book. In my experience, that kind of bespoke nerdiness is relatively rare. But The Riddle of the Labyrinth—which is about, among other things, history, mythology, ancient civilizations, linguistics, puzzles, code-breaking, Homer, Arthur Conan Doyle, and brainy female academics—has my particular name all over it.

As a rule, I would prefer not to have my name all over Fox’s work, since she is best known as an obituary writer for the New York Times. That beat does not normally make celebrities of its practitioners, so it says a lot about Fox’s writing ability that her obits have acquired something of a cult following. The form demands three things: a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality. Fox has all three, in spades, and in The Riddle of the Labyrinth she uses them to capture not the life and death of an individual but the death and afterlife of an entire language.

The result is what Fox calls, aptly, a “paleographic procedural.� It unfolds in three parts: “The Digger,� “The Detective,� and “The Architect.� The digger is the archaeologist Arthur Evans, who discovered the first thousand Linear B tablets in 1900 at Knossos, Crete. The architect is Michael Ventris, who deciphered the writing on those tablets 52 years later, at the age of 29, after a lifelong obsession but just eighteen months of dedicated work. Both men became famous for their discoveries, and their lives have been extensively chronicled elsewhere. But not so the detective, Alice Kober, who forms the literal and figurative center of Fox’s book.

For modern readers, Kober seems like something of a casualty of her times. A workaholic classics professor at Brooklyn College, she poured herself into the study of Linear B—mastering along the way Akkadian, Chinese, Persian, Braille, statistics, archaeology, chemistry, and physics—and became, during her too-short lifetime, the world’s leading scholar on the subject. But she lived in an era when women’s intellectual contributions were routinely ignored or co-opted, she never got to see for herself the tablets that so obsessed her, and she died before she could complete her solution. And, until now, her reputation essentially died with her. History is not kind to those who don’t cross the finish line, even when they carry their competitors for two-thirds of the race.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth sets out to restore to Kober her proper place in the Linear B tale, a project helped along by the fact that her archives were recently made public. But even with those archives open, the woman herself remains something of a closed book, shady not in the ethical sense but in all the others: cool, grave, nuanced, out of the spotlight, deeply interesting yet the opposite of colorful. The one thing that stands out starkly in an otherwise ambiguous character is the force of her intellect. Kober is Fox’s Sherlock Holmes: patient, precise, analytical, unswayed by emotions—indeed, apparently unpossessed of a private life. “It is unfortunate,� she wrote in one characteristic letter, “that it is only in geometry that a scholar must state his assumptions clearly before he begins his proof.� One wants to buy her a deerstalker. But what she wanted, and found, was a mystery worthy of her exceptional mind. ...

The conventional approach to that problem involved guessing what language people were speaking on Crete in 1500 B.C.—Hittite? Etruscan? Polynesian?—and working backward from there. Kober had no patience for this method. “It is possible,� she said, “to prove, quite logically, that the Cretans spoke any language whatever known to have existed at the time—provided only that one disregards that half a dozen other possibilities are equally logical and equally likely.� Her greatest contribution, not merely to Linear B but to decipherment in general, was to prove that you can crack a script without making assumptions about the language it encodes but simply by studying, with immense exactitude, its own internal relations.

Today, that work would be dramatically eased by technology: computing, crowdsourcing, digital databases, instantly accessible international colleagues, online academic journals, Mechanical Turk. Kober, by contrast, worked without mechanical anything; technologically, she might as well have been a Cretan scribe. Finally granted five weeks in Oxford to study pictures of some 2,000 inscriptions, she spent them frantically copying down as many as possible by hand. (“I’ve timed myself and I think I can copy between 100�125 inscriptions in a twelve-hour day.�) To make matters worse, her deciphering career coincided with World War II–related shortages, which meant she could barely get her hands on one of the most low-tech tools of all: paper. To work out the Linear B problem, she resorted to hoarding the backs of greeting cards and the blank parts of church circulars. That constraint is so startling to read about today that, in a sense, Fox has written another obituary here—not to a dead language but to a bygone era of problem-solving.

In the end, it is the intensity of that drive toward answers, far more than the answer itself, that fascinated me most about this story. Yes, the Linear B solution is elegant and surprising; yes, it sheds light on everything from the chronology of ancient civilizations to an otherwise enigmatic passage in The Iliad. But what really charmed me about this book is how it both describes and demonstrates the unstoppable workings of intellectual curiosity. “The pull of an undeciphered ancient script,� Fox writes, “comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once, long ago, someone could.� Something similar could be said about the pull of this book. Its allure doesn’t lie only with the problem, nor only with the solution, nor even with the people who ultimately solved it. It lies in the impulse—common to all of us yet everywhere remarkable—to look at a scary, unsolved, nearly impossible problem and think: Someone could.

*This article will appear in the May 27, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


A RAVE REVIEW FROM THE DAILY BEAST:

May 17, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

When Alice Kober died at the age of 45, she was a forgotten and ignored classics professor. But she arguably did more than anyone to decode what was then the oldest written European language known to exist.

As Margalit Fox says at the outset of The Riddle of the Labyrinth, the story of Linear B is well known. This 3,000-year-old language was discovered on clay tablets excavated in 1900 on the island of Crete. It thereafter puzzled scholars for half a century before it was decoded by Michael Ventris, an English architect with no formal training in archeology or linguistics. Linear B’s history is an absorbing tale, full of mysteries both intellectual and historical, and it’s been told and retold since Ventris made his breakthrough. The problem, as Fox sees it, is that what’s been published so far is by no means the whole story. Previous versions, she argues, neglect a major player, so much so that the story as we know it amounts to if not a lie then certainly a libel. The Riddle of the Labyrinth is her attempt to set the record straight, to apportion credit correctly, and by doing so to explicate the solution of Linear B in a way that at last makes sense.

As anyone who eagerly looks forward to the obituaries Fox writes for The New York Times knows, she has an extraordinary talent for teasing out the odd fact and the telling detail in the lives she chronicles. In Alice Kober, the linguist and classics professor whose work on Linear B was so crucial to its solution, but whose contributions have heretofore been routinely belittled or ignored, Fox has found a life worthy of her talents.

For those who came in late: the clay tablets containing Linear B were unearthed by the English archeologist Arthur Evans in 1900 at Knossos on the island of Crete. Almost immediately, he knew what he had found in the lines of symbols and drawings (horses, chariots, swords): the annual records of a lost Bronze Age civilization recording its crops, livestock, weaponry, and slaves, among other things. Evans couldn’t read the tablets. As Fox puts it, an “unknown script used to write an unknown language is a locked-room mystery.� But he understood their import: here was a written language at least 1,000 years older than any other European language known to exist. “Once their written records could be read, the Knossos palace and its people, languishing for 30 centuries in the dusk of prehistory, would suddenly be illuminated,� Fox observes. “With a single stroke, an entire civilization would become history.�

Evans spent four decades trying to decipher the tablets, but he died without cracking the code. Others failed as well. Then came Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College. She worked alone, collating information on index cards she cut out herself (paper was scarce during World War II and thereafter, when she did a lot of her work). Her file boxes were empty cigarette cartons. But if her means were humble, her intellect was formidable. It was Kober who first realized that the syllabic script on the tablets was inflected, meaning, Fox explains, “that it relied on word endings, much as Latin or German or Spanish does, to give its sentences grammar.� She also figured out that of the four figures in a typical word, the third figure was a bridge between the root and the ending. She was also the only authority on the Knossos tablets who refused to believe that the language written there was Etruscan, although she never proved it. (Nearly every one of her guesses would eventually be proven correct.) And if Kober ever dreamed of vindication, she could have asked for no better champion than Fox, who brings to life her zealous subject’s obsession with a host of vivid details. Of a research trip Kober made to England in 1947, Fox writes, “Kober boarded the Queen Elizabeth for the six-day passage � She planned to learn Ancient Egyptian on the boat trip over.�

Kober died in 1950, when she was only 43. Two years later, building on the groundwork she had so painstakingly laid, Ventris successfully solved the mystery: the language was Greek, although the written form bore no resemblance to the same tongue that would later be written in the borrowed Phoenician alphabet known to us. Fox is never grudging about his accomplishment, but she doesn’t need to be. By the time we get to Ventris, the extraordinary work done by Kober has been so well documented that what Ventris did almost seems like a footnote and certainly like an anti-climax. Curiously, he, too, would die young, in a car crash that may have been suicide, only four years after solving the mystery.

For those who relish languages living or dead, The Riddle of the Labyrinth should be pure heaven, as it will be for anyone obsessed with puzzles. But there is also plenty for us whose knowledge of linguistic mystery is summed up in the comedian Steven Wright’s query: Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? You don’t have to know the intricacies of how language works or how people unriddle it to enjoy Fox’s book, although goodness knows she’s gone to great lengths to explain it all in perfectly lucid fashion—if you’re like me, you’ll have to reread a lot, but the explanations are there if you stick with it. The deciphering of Linear B solved a slew of mysteries in a single stroke. For example, by the time of Homer, around the 7th and 8th centuries B.C., Greek had lost its written form, and yet Homer sings of writing in his epics—now we know why. But the takeaway for the average reader is a splendid detective story that constantly wavers between success and tragedy. It’s the people in this tale, Kober and Ventris particularly, who stick with you, for theirs is a tale that inspires you even as it breaks your heart. Maybe someone could tell this story better than Fox has, but I don’t see how.
]]> 3.97 2013
author: Margalit Fox
name: Margalit
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/06/01
shelves: my-rooting-interest
review:
A RAVE REVIEW FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

‘The Riddle of the Labyrinth,� by Margalit Fox
By MATTI FRIEDMAN
Published: May 30, 2013

The events of the past grow more alien as our distance from them increases, receding until they become, finally, unknowable. Unknowable, that is, but for those who take it upon themselves to decode the symbols, to examine what others see as indecipherable or unimportant, to sift a story from the chaff and to resurrect names, places, actions and ideas that would otherwise be lost.

Alice Kober, the subject of Margalit Fox’s new book, was one such scholar. A classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and �40s, she played a key role in solving one of the 20th century’s great academic riddles: how to read a 3,400-year-old script known as Linear B, unearthed amid the ruins of the Minoan civilization of Crete, the mythic home of the labyrinth of Daedalus and the Minotaur.

Kober deserves much of the credit for “one of the most prodigious intellectual feats of modern times,� Ms. Fox writes. Yet after Kober’s death in 1950, she was promptly forgotten.

Ms. Fox, an obituary writer at The New York Times, set out to rectify this, and by retrieving a woman who might otherwise have vanished, she 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. The first is Arthur Evans, the renowned adventurer and archaeologist who, digging on Crete in 1900, discovered clay tablets with an unknown script. It was written with linear strokes, rather than with Egyptian-style hieroglyphs or the cuneiform wedges of Mesopotamia, so he called it Linear B. (An earlier script unearthed at the site was named Linear A.)

Evans was that particular type of Englishman who would say of an attempt by ruffians to assassinate him, “People seem excited about it, but what is certain is that I was not.� He had a low opinion of “inferior races� and might have brought some of that baggage to his linguistic analysis. The script, he thought, belonged to a superior civilization, and the enigmatic symbols seemed to him to have a “free, upright European character.� Back at his mansion near Oxford, replete with models of Minoan thrones and a mosaic of the Minotaur, he tried for decades to decode these symbols but didn’t come close.

A second Englishman, Michael Ventris, a brilliant and fragile architect and amateur linguist, began trying to crack the code after encountering Evans and his tablets on a school trip in 1936, when he was 14. Working at the same time as Kober and using some of her methods and observations, he finally succeeded just before his 30th birthday.

Both men achieved fame in their lifetime, but Ms. Fox makes a case for Kober, the “unprepossessing� daughter of Hungarian immigrants, as the story’s hero. Her thick glasses, unstylish hair and prim mouth belied the “snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method,� Ms. Fox writes. Kober dedicated her life to solving the riddle, laboring at her dining table in Brooklyn, “ever-present cigarette at hand.� She never married, and her extensive correspondence, we learn, contains a total of two mentions of a social life.

There was hardly time. To aid her quest, she learned Chinese, Akkadian, Persian, Hittite and Basque, among other tongues, and eventually prepared no fewer than 180,000 index cards as she struggled to develop a system that would allow her to crack what Ms. Fox calls a “locked-room mystery� � deciphering an unknown script that an unknown society used to write an unknown language. A Linear B scholar was operating in a “linguistic terra incognita with neither map nor compass at hand.� Without a guide like the Rosetta stone (the multilingual inscription that finally allowed scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs) the task was thought to be all but impossible.

That it turned out not to be is a testament to what the human brain, or at least the rare human brain, is capable of. 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, two of whom met tragic and untimely ends.

When the code was finally cracked, the result did not immediately appear equal to the intensity of the pursuit; if the archaeologists on Crete had hoped to find the Minoan equivalent of the Library of Congress, instead they seem to have unearthed the offices of the I.R.S.

But even bureaucracy has its poetry; thanks to the decoded script, we are introduced to an island where people worshiped familiar gods like Poseidon alongside intriguing ones like the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and where folks were walking around with names like Gladly Welcome, Snub-Nosed and � here’s the guy who must have been the life of Knossos back in the day � Having the Bottom Bare.

Ms. Fox is attentive to touching traces of idiosyncratic humanity, past and ancient: The church pamphlets and library slips Kober cut up to serve as index cards during the paper shortages of World War II; the “scribal doodles� � a bull, a man, a maze � found on the tablets; the mark a Cretan scribe made when erasing a character on wet clay with his thumb all those centuries ago. “To look at the tablets even now is to be in the presence of other people � living, thinking, literate people,� she writes.

“The Riddle of the Labyrinth� leaves one pondering what traces will stand as remains of the present, when there is no longer physical correspondence and much of a scholar’s work exists nowhere but in digital form � that is to say, nowhere.

It’s quite possible that our records will be as inaccessible a century from now as those of the ancient Minoans were to the language detectives in this book. Figuring out who we were and what we thought � should anyone deem that worthwhile � might make decoding Linear B look easy.

Matti Friedman is the author of “The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books� (Algonquin).
A version of this review appeared in print on May 31, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Brooklyn Breaker of Ancient Codes.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 31, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Brooklyn Breaker of Ancient Codes.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A RAVE REVIEW FROM NEW YORK MAGAZINE:
5/16/13 at 5:15 PM

By Kathryn Schulz

Viewed in a certain light, the thousands of inscribed clay tablets unearthed over the past century on Crete and mainland Greece are profoundly boring. Essentially the scattered files of an early civilization’s accounting department, the tablets list rations of wheat and figs, record the results of the local census, and keep track of broken versus unbroken chariot wheels. Fully 800 of them are, as Margalit Fox writes in her new book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, “quite literally devoted to counting sheep.� In short, they are not the world’s most fascinating reading material. But for a long time after their discovery that didn’t matter, because no one had any idea at all how to read them.

What does make for fascinating reading is Fox’s book, which recounts the 50-year quest to decipher Linear B, the writing on those tablets. A few chapters in, I found myself thinking about a specific and unusual form of literary pleasure: that of seeing one’s own pet subjects reflected in a book. In my experience, that kind of bespoke nerdiness is relatively rare. But The Riddle of the Labyrinth—which is about, among other things, history, mythology, ancient civilizations, linguistics, puzzles, code-breaking, Homer, Arthur Conan Doyle, and brainy female academics—has my particular name all over it.

As a rule, I would prefer not to have my name all over Fox’s work, since she is best known as an obituary writer for the New York Times. That beat does not normally make celebrities of its practitioners, so it says a lot about Fox’s writing ability that her obits have acquired something of a cult following. The form demands three things: a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality. Fox has all three, in spades, and in The Riddle of the Labyrinth she uses them to capture not the life and death of an individual but the death and afterlife of an entire language.

The result is what Fox calls, aptly, a “paleographic procedural.� It unfolds in three parts: “The Digger,� “The Detective,� and “The Architect.� The digger is the archaeologist Arthur Evans, who discovered the first thousand Linear B tablets in 1900 at Knossos, Crete. The architect is Michael Ventris, who deciphered the writing on those tablets 52 years later, at the age of 29, after a lifelong obsession but just eighteen months of dedicated work. Both men became famous for their discoveries, and their lives have been extensively chronicled elsewhere. But not so the detective, Alice Kober, who forms the literal and figurative center of Fox’s book.

For modern readers, Kober seems like something of a casualty of her times. A workaholic classics professor at Brooklyn College, she poured herself into the study of Linear B—mastering along the way Akkadian, Chinese, Persian, Braille, statistics, archaeology, chemistry, and physics—and became, during her too-short lifetime, the world’s leading scholar on the subject. But she lived in an era when women’s intellectual contributions were routinely ignored or co-opted, she never got to see for herself the tablets that so obsessed her, and she died before she could complete her solution. And, until now, her reputation essentially died with her. History is not kind to those who don’t cross the finish line, even when they carry their competitors for two-thirds of the race.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth sets out to restore to Kober her proper place in the Linear B tale, a project helped along by the fact that her archives were recently made public. But even with those archives open, the woman herself remains something of a closed book, shady not in the ethical sense but in all the others: cool, grave, nuanced, out of the spotlight, deeply interesting yet the opposite of colorful. The one thing that stands out starkly in an otherwise ambiguous character is the force of her intellect. Kober is Fox’s Sherlock Holmes: patient, precise, analytical, unswayed by emotions—indeed, apparently unpossessed of a private life. “It is unfortunate,� she wrote in one characteristic letter, “that it is only in geometry that a scholar must state his assumptions clearly before he begins his proof.� One wants to buy her a deerstalker. But what she wanted, and found, was a mystery worthy of her exceptional mind. ...

The conventional approach to that problem involved guessing what language people were speaking on Crete in 1500 B.C.—Hittite? Etruscan? Polynesian?—and working backward from there. Kober had no patience for this method. “It is possible,� she said, “to prove, quite logically, that the Cretans spoke any language whatever known to have existed at the time—provided only that one disregards that half a dozen other possibilities are equally logical and equally likely.� Her greatest contribution, not merely to Linear B but to decipherment in general, was to prove that you can crack a script without making assumptions about the language it encodes but simply by studying, with immense exactitude, its own internal relations.

Today, that work would be dramatically eased by technology: computing, crowdsourcing, digital databases, instantly accessible international colleagues, online academic journals, Mechanical Turk. Kober, by contrast, worked without mechanical anything; technologically, she might as well have been a Cretan scribe. Finally granted five weeks in Oxford to study pictures of some 2,000 inscriptions, she spent them frantically copying down as many as possible by hand. (“I’ve timed myself and I think I can copy between 100�125 inscriptions in a twelve-hour day.�) To make matters worse, her deciphering career coincided with World War II–related shortages, which meant she could barely get her hands on one of the most low-tech tools of all: paper. To work out the Linear B problem, she resorted to hoarding the backs of greeting cards and the blank parts of church circulars. That constraint is so startling to read about today that, in a sense, Fox has written another obituary here—not to a dead language but to a bygone era of problem-solving.

In the end, it is the intensity of that drive toward answers, far more than the answer itself, that fascinated me most about this story. Yes, the Linear B solution is elegant and surprising; yes, it sheds light on everything from the chronology of ancient civilizations to an otherwise enigmatic passage in The Iliad. But what really charmed me about this book is how it both describes and demonstrates the unstoppable workings of intellectual curiosity. “The pull of an undeciphered ancient script,� Fox writes, “comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once, long ago, someone could.� Something similar could be said about the pull of this book. Its allure doesn’t lie only with the problem, nor only with the solution, nor even with the people who ultimately solved it. It lies in the impulse—common to all of us yet everywhere remarkable—to look at a scary, unsolved, nearly impossible problem and think: Someone could.

*This article will appear in the May 27, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.


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A RAVE REVIEW FROM THE DAILY BEAST:

May 17, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

When Alice Kober died at the age of 45, she was a forgotten and ignored classics professor. But she arguably did more than anyone to decode what was then the oldest written European language known to exist.

As Margalit Fox says at the outset of The Riddle of the Labyrinth, the story of Linear B is well known. This 3,000-year-old language was discovered on clay tablets excavated in 1900 on the island of Crete. It thereafter puzzled scholars for half a century before it was decoded by Michael Ventris, an English architect with no formal training in archeology or linguistics. Linear B’s history is an absorbing tale, full of mysteries both intellectual and historical, and it’s been told and retold since Ventris made his breakthrough. The problem, as Fox sees it, is that what’s been published so far is by no means the whole story. Previous versions, she argues, neglect a major player, so much so that the story as we know it amounts to if not a lie then certainly a libel. The Riddle of the Labyrinth is her attempt to set the record straight, to apportion credit correctly, and by doing so to explicate the solution of Linear B in a way that at last makes sense.

As anyone who eagerly looks forward to the obituaries Fox writes for The New York Times knows, she has an extraordinary talent for teasing out the odd fact and the telling detail in the lives she chronicles. In Alice Kober, the linguist and classics professor whose work on Linear B was so crucial to its solution, but whose contributions have heretofore been routinely belittled or ignored, Fox has found a life worthy of her talents.

For those who came in late: the clay tablets containing Linear B were unearthed by the English archeologist Arthur Evans in 1900 at Knossos on the island of Crete. Almost immediately, he knew what he had found in the lines of symbols and drawings (horses, chariots, swords): the annual records of a lost Bronze Age civilization recording its crops, livestock, weaponry, and slaves, among other things. Evans couldn’t read the tablets. As Fox puts it, an “unknown script used to write an unknown language is a locked-room mystery.� But he understood their import: here was a written language at least 1,000 years older than any other European language known to exist. “Once their written records could be read, the Knossos palace and its people, languishing for 30 centuries in the dusk of prehistory, would suddenly be illuminated,� Fox observes. “With a single stroke, an entire civilization would become history.�

Evans spent four decades trying to decipher the tablets, but he died without cracking the code. Others failed as well. Then came Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College. She worked alone, collating information on index cards she cut out herself (paper was scarce during World War II and thereafter, when she did a lot of her work). Her file boxes were empty cigarette cartons. But if her means were humble, her intellect was formidable. It was Kober who first realized that the syllabic script on the tablets was inflected, meaning, Fox explains, “that it relied on word endings, much as Latin or German or Spanish does, to give its sentences grammar.� She also figured out that of the four figures in a typical word, the third figure was a bridge between the root and the ending. She was also the only authority on the Knossos tablets who refused to believe that the language written there was Etruscan, although she never proved it. (Nearly every one of her guesses would eventually be proven correct.) And if Kober ever dreamed of vindication, she could have asked for no better champion than Fox, who brings to life her zealous subject’s obsession with a host of vivid details. Of a research trip Kober made to England in 1947, Fox writes, “Kober boarded the Queen Elizabeth for the six-day passage � She planned to learn Ancient Egyptian on the boat trip over.�

Kober died in 1950, when she was only 43. Two years later, building on the groundwork she had so painstakingly laid, Ventris successfully solved the mystery: the language was Greek, although the written form bore no resemblance to the same tongue that would later be written in the borrowed Phoenician alphabet known to us. Fox is never grudging about his accomplishment, but she doesn’t need to be. By the time we get to Ventris, the extraordinary work done by Kober has been so well documented that what Ventris did almost seems like a footnote and certainly like an anti-climax. Curiously, he, too, would die young, in a car crash that may have been suicide, only four years after solving the mystery.

For those who relish languages living or dead, The Riddle of the Labyrinth should be pure heaven, as it will be for anyone obsessed with puzzles. But there is also plenty for us whose knowledge of linguistic mystery is summed up in the comedian Steven Wright’s query: Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? You don’t have to know the intricacies of how language works or how people unriddle it to enjoy Fox’s book, although goodness knows she’s gone to great lengths to explain it all in perfectly lucid fashion—if you’re like me, you’ll have to reread a lot, but the explanations are there if you stick with it. The deciphering of Linear B solved a slew of mysteries in a single stroke. For example, by the time of Homer, around the 7th and 8th centuries B.C., Greek had lost its written form, and yet Homer sings of writing in his epics—now we know why. But the takeaway for the average reader is a splendid detective story that constantly wavers between success and tragedy. It’s the people in this tale, Kober and Ventris particularly, who stick with you, for theirs is a tale that inspires you even as it breaks your heart. Maybe someone could tell this story better than Fox has, but I don’t see how.

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Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as "Talking Hands" grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered.

"Talking Hands" offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind.

Written in lyrical, accessible prose, "Talking Hands" will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places.]]> 354 Margalit Fox 0743247124 Margalit 0 my-rooting-interest 4.00 2007
author: Margalit Fox
name: Margalit
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/02/14
shelves: my-rooting-interest
review:

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