New Book about the Decipherment of Minoan Linear B

[margalit...@gmail.com]

Dear Friends:

On Tuesday, May 14, HarperCollins will publish my new narrative nonfiction book, "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code."

Six years in the making (I am a senior writer at The New York Times, originally trained as a linguist), the book tells the true story of the race to decipher the mysterious Aegean Bronze Age Script known as Linear B.

Besides recounting the life stories of the three brilliant, obsessed and ultimately doomed investigators whose combined work solved the riddle of the script, I also take readers step by step through the forensic process involved in deciphering a three-thousand-year-old secret code.

In its recent starred review, Booklist described "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" as having "an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense," adding, "While we’re reading the book we’re on the edge of our seats."

Reserve your copy today, at http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Riddle-of-the-Labyrinth-Margalit-Fox

All my best,

Margalit

[Yusuf B Gursey]

> Reserve your copy today, athttp://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Riddle-of-the-Labyrinth-Margal...
>
> All my best,
>
> Margalit

except that now it has become to be better known as the Mycenean
script, ever since its decipherment.

[Peter T. Daniels]

Margalit Fox is best known as a brilliant writer of obituaries. As
Jerry Sadock (I think it was) remarked about her essay on Jim
McCawley, "It was an obituary to die for!"

I will admit to being curious as to how books on writing by
journalists are published regularly by mainstream publishers, while
books on writing for the general public by scholars of writing cannot
find an outlet.

[benl...@ihug.co.nz]

Margalit Fox does also, apparently have a BA and MA in Linguistics (from Stony Brook). She has been referred to a couple of times previously on this group, for an article on Chomskyan Minimalism (1998), and a book on sign languages (2007). So one would expect higher standards from her than from just any journalist (or obituarist) writing about language.

[Peter T. Daniels]

True!

Presumably it's a lot better than Andrew Robinson's unreadable
"biography" of Ventris. (His subsequent biographies were
improvements.)

But why did Amalia Gnanadesikan's excellent book have to come from
Wiley-Blackwell -- and hence get no promotion or distribution
whatsoever -- when the shelves are full of junk like David Sacks's?

Even the occasional book on linguistic theory comes from a mainstream
publisher and is on mainstream shelves, like Mark Baker's. (But
writing books are strictly the province of charlatans.)

The exceptions are John McWhorter, who has the entire rightwing
propaganda machine behind him, and David Crystal, whose books
originate in the UK (and some of which in recent years have been
pretty thin, in both size and content).

[Curlytop]

margalit...@gmail.com set the following eddies spiralling through the
space-time continuum:

> Dear Friends:
>
> On Tuesday, May 14, HarperCollins will publish my new narrative nonfiction
> book, "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code."
>
> Six years in the making (I am a senior writer at The New York Times,
> originally trained as a linguist), the book tells the true story of the
> race to decipher the mysterious Aegean Bronze Age Script known as Linear
> B.

Any progress on Linear A yet?
--
ξ: ) Proud to be curly

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