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The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code Audiobook
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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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"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
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“Fox’s achievement here is to make this fascinating tale accessible to a broader audience.”
— Washington Post -
“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)
Awards
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Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Nonfiction
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About Margalit Fox
Margalit Fox is the author of Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Talking Hands, and The Confidence Men. Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, she is considered one the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism. She trained as a linguist and was a senior writer at the New York Times. As a former member of the newspaper's celebrated obituary news department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age.
About Pam Ward
Pam Ward, an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, found her true calling reading books for the blind and physically handicapped for the Library of Congress’ Talking Books program. The fact that she can work with Blackstone Audio from the beauty of the mountains of Southern Oregon is an unexpected bonus.