CANR
WORK TITLE: Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://edwarddolnick.net/
CITY: Washington
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 338
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 10, 1952; married Lynn Iphigene Golden, 1973; children: Benjamin, Samuel.
EDUCATION:Brandeis University, B.A.; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Former chief science writer at Boston Globe, Boston, MA.
AVOCATIONS:Watching basketball on television.
AWARDS:Edgar Award, 2006.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and newspapers, including Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Literary Review, and the New York Times magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Journalist Edward Dolnick’s first book, Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis, focuses on American psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s. The author points out that the psychiatrists of the mid-twentieth century relied primarily on the psychoanalytic approach to treating patients. This methodology was developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), an Austrian neurologist who theorized that repressed memories lie at the root of some mental illnesses. According to the author, this approach was used even to treat such severe psychotic illnesses as schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The reasoning behind this, writes Dolnick, is that the psychiatric community was relying on the hope that such diseases could be successfully treated if environmental factors, such as childhood abuse, could be explained as the cause of the disorders. The author writes that this approach traumatized many families before it was abandoned in favor of pharmaceutical treatment of severe psychoses.
Nevertheless, as pointed out by Mary Ann Hughes in the Library Journal, the “echoes of the period Dolnick examines still linger.”
Dolnick turned his attention to a pioneering adventurer for Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon. He recounts the story of Powell—who lost an arm in the U.S. Civil War—and his crew as they set out to map the great, unexplored territories of the West and pursue Powell’s interest in the area’s geology. As described both by Dolnick and the crew themselves through their diaries, the conditions of the expedition soon deteriorated. River rapids smashed boats, heat caused food spoilage, and the harsh desert environment made mobility on land difficult. All these factors took their toll the crew, who quickly became disenchanted with their leader.
“Written with authority and zeal, this rich narrative is popular history at its best,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. A reviewer writing in Publishers Weekly noted that readers will “emerge battered but illuminated.” Gilbert Taylor commented in Booklist that the author has written an “estimable rendition of that storied expedition” and also noted Dolnick’s “well-detailed characterizations of the expedition members and their motivations and dissensions.”
The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece focuses on theft in the art world as Dolnick tells the story of Charley Hill, an undercover cop who worked for Scotland Yard and once aspired to be a priest. Hill, who went on to become a private detective, specializes in recovering stolen art masterpieces. The author explains Hill’s success in this area as being partially due to the detective’s chameleon-like nature, which allows him to mingle effortlessly with crooks and cops, as well as with businesspeople and aristocrats. Dolnick also focuses on the 1994 theft from Norway’s National Gallery in Oslo and the recovery of The Scream, a painting by Edvard Munch. As told by the author, the police were baffled by the theft, and it was Hill’s expertise that eventually led to the painting’s recovery.
A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that “the narrative’s frequent detours to other crimes and engaging escapades from Hill’s past elevate this work.” Writing in Time, Richard Lacayo called the book an “entertaining account of the eternal struggle between high art and low cunning,” while Business Week reviewer Monica Gagnier declared the effort an “engaging tour of this little-known world.”
In The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Dolnick recounts the story of Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter and art dealer who, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, successfully painted a number of works in the style of the artist Vermeer and passed them off as previously undiscovered paintings by that artist. At the time, only a small number of Vermeers were in existence, so collectors were often in a frenzy to outbid each other in order to possess one. By adding to the pool of work supposedly by Vermeer, van Meegeren tapped into a highly enthusiastic niche in the art world. Over the course of the book, Dolnick tells the story of van Meegeren’s forgeries and reveals how he was eventually discovered and the breadth of his deception was realized. But Dolnick takes his work further, analyzing van Meegeren himself and attempting to determine what would prompt an artist, who was himself sufficiently proficient with a brush that he could satisfactorily imitate a great painter, to hide behind the name of another rather than produce his own, original work under his own name, and thereby earn the accolades and praise for the work himself. Why forge a work of art instead of painting one’s own?
The motivations behind the forgeries prove to be fairly simple on the surface. Dolnick himself notes that van Meegeren could earn far more money with his fake Vermeers than he could with original works, even had he become a fairly successful painter under his own name. The forgeries he sold earned him a total approaching thirty million dollars in today’s money, an enormous sum that he never could have achieved through honest methods. However, once he was caught, van Meegeren also claimed that he wanted to pull one over on the critics who had been so harsh regarding his own, original work, claiming he was without talent. By producing Vermeer-style paintings that fooled so many experts and collectors—including Hermann Goering, deputy to Hitler, who was among his customers—van Meegeren believed he was countering this claim.
Mary Wiltenburg, in a review for the Christian Science Monitor, declared that “Dolnick, the author of a previous award-winning book on art crime, brings all these characters and dilemmas alive, but his portrait of Goering, the ‘perfumed monster,’ is the book’s most powerful. From his fanatical art hoarding, to his pet lions and phallic-legged tables, to his penchant for showing up at public functions practically in drag, Goering was a strange and in many ways ideal mark.”
Van Meegeren’s deception was uncovered in the wake of World War II, when he found himself being investigated for selling Vermeers to the Nazis, considered to have been a major crime. To avoid the charges, van Meegeren was forced to admit to a different crime entirely and confessed to having painted the works himself. To prove his statement, he painted a fake Vermeer while still being held by the police. In an attempt to couch himself in a better light, he claimed to have conned one of the major figures of the Third Reich and said he could therefore not be held for treason. He was, however, tried for fraud instead, though he ultimately died from heart disease prior to serving any of his one-year sentence. Dolnick’s book discusses the various theories and justifications behind van Meegeren’s actions, as well as looking at the act of forgery itself. Dolnick questions how van Meegeren’s forgeries actually passed for Vermeers, given that it appears obvious even to a layperson that, when compared to the actual artist’s work, van Meegeren’s attempts were fakes. Anthony Julius, writing for the New York Times Book Review, commented: “Forgery is interesting in part because it demands great, if imitative, skill, and in part because copying itself has become a significant aspect of contemporary art-making. It is an art-crime that encourages reflections on the nature of art itself. This book is an aid to such reflections.”
In The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Dolnick offers a summary of the mathematical ideas that were developed by the free thinkers of the eighteenth century. In this work Dolnick argues that this period was highly significant in laying the groundwork for modern mathematics.
In a review of the work, New York Times Book Review contributor Ann Finkbeiner criticized: “Dolnick’s book is lively and the characters are vivid. But the story feels disjointed. For instance, you’re never quite sure why, having just read about the Pythagorean theorem, you’re now reading about Johannes Kepler. The story has also been told already and often, and you have to wonder what drew the author to it.” Commentary contributor John Steele Gordon remarked: “Dolnick has a very considerable talent for explaining sophisticated and subtle scientific and mathematical concepts without lapsing into jargon. With the help of the many simple diagrams in the book, anyone who managed to get through high school—even those who took a minimum of math—will have no trouble understanding what’s going on.” Wall Street Journal contributor Alan Hirshfeld observed: “Dolnick presents this free-for-all of ideas as a character-rich, historical narrative while providing a detailed account of the period’s many advances, primarily Isaac Newton’s mathematical formulations of motion and gravity.”
The Rush: America’s Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853 is Dolnick’s account of a short but turbulent period in American history: the California Gold Rush, when individuals from around the country struck out for the west coast in search of riches. From the time gold was first discovered at the legendary Sutter’s Mill, the lure of easy wealth from a large gold strike was too much to resist. Dolnick describes how eastern shopkeepers, teachers, farmers, clerks, and others who were not used to the hardships of overland travel and outdoor living nonetheless loaded up wagons and headed west. The chance at almost immediate wealth was too much for these intrepid but often ill-fated individuals to resist. “Many of these greenhorns had never slept out of doors, had never cooked a meal. But they were generally literate, and they wrote copious letters and diaries,” observed Wall Street Journal contributor Gerard Helferich.
Dolnick’s account centers on five distinct individuals who struggled their way into the California goldfields with varying levels of success—and some who had no success at all. “Relying on an impressive array of gold rush diaries and letters, Dolnick skillfully peppers his account with dozens of first-person quotations and experiences from his subjects,” noted New York Times Book Review contributor Walter R. Borneman. Luzena Wilson, for example, ultimately made her fortune in real estate, not gold. Alonzo Delano failed to find gold but carved a moderate success out of writing about the rush. Jennie Megquier succeeded in running a boardinghouse in San Francisco before heading home to Maine, only to be drawn to the goldfields a second time. Some of those who headed to California did get rich from their discoveries of gold. However, Dolnick confirms the ironic reports that the individuals who made the most off the California Gold Rush were not the prospectors but the hardware merchants, tavern owners, bankers, prostitutes, and other providers of goods and services who supplied the gold-seekers with gear and recreation.
Dolnick’s narrative successfully “brings to life the giddy excitement and mortal dangers of the California gold rush,” commented Library Journal reviewer Nathan Bender. “Rich with first-person accounts and studded with surprises, The Rush will please readers looking for a breezy, compact narrative,” Helferich remarked. Borneman concluded that Dolnick “has produced a highly readable and graphic account of an episode that changed America.” A Publishers Weekly writer remarked, “Dolnick’s compulsively readable story is one that’s rarely been told better.”
In The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to Da Vinci, from Shark’s Teeth to Frog’s Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From, Dolnick discusses the evolution of scientific beliefs on reproduction. He begins his narrative with scientific thought on the subject during the Middle Ages and continues through the nineteenth century, when a sperm was first observed entering an egg. Among the thinkers who beliefs Dolnick shares are Galen, Aristotle, Da Vinci, William Harvey, Regnier de Graaf, Lazzaro Spallanzani, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, Jean-Louis Provost, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, and Oscar Hertwig.
Reviewing the book in Commentary, John Steele Gordon asserted: “ The Seeds of Life is science-history writing at its very best. It tells a great story that reads like a mystery novel. But Dolnick also uses the story to demonstrate how science advances: through curiosity, brilliant insight, analogy, logic, experimentation, and hard work. Equally, he shows how it can be retarded by unexamined assumptions, ad hominem arguments, misplaced ego, and stubborn adherence to outworn theories.” Colleen Mondor, a contributor to Booklist, commented: “Combining first-class research and a truly delightful writing style, Dolnick shares his fascination with the history of science.” “Dolnick composes a cohesive narrative around his central question while noting its appeal as a side topic,” remarked a Publishers Weekly writer. A critic in Kirkus Reviews noted that The Seeds of Life offered “the best sort of science history, explaining not only how great men made great discoveries, but why equally great men … missed what was in front of their noses.”
(open new) Dolnick tells the story of competition among scholars to decipher an ancient script in his 2021 volume, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in the ruins of the Minoan civilization in Crete and was estimated to be approximately 3,400 years old. It included by writing in Greek and in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the latter of which had confounded scholars for centuries. Because of geopolitical events, many hieroglyphs were destroyed, leaving relatively few to study. By the fifth century, hieroglyphs had long been abandoned as forms of communication and even Egyptian scholars, including the priest, Horapallo, were only able to make conjectures as to what their symbols meant. The British army took possession of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt during a skirmish with Napoleon’s army, and they sent it off to be examined by scholars at the British Museum. Because the Stone contained both Greek writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which could be compares to one another, it became scholars’ best opportunity to finally crack the code of the hieroglyphs. Two scholars in particular emerged, determined to decode the Rosetta Stone. Thomas Young was a British physicist and linguist, and Jean-François Champollion was a French scholar of ancient Egypt. Champollion was fluent in Coptic, which was related to ancient Egyptian, giving him an advantage in translating the text. Though Young and Champollion attempted to undermine one another, they were cordial in person and each made discoveries that helped to finally decode hieroglyphics. Edward K. Werner, contributor to Library Journal, asserted: “Dolnick presents a fast-paced intellectual adventure for general readers.” Werner also stated that the book was “highly recommended for anyone who relishes challenging puzzles.” A Kirkus Reviews critic called the volume “a largely engaging … look at language and the limits of what we can understand.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joshua Hammer described it as “an engrossing account” and “another intricate intellectual caper.” Hammer added: “Dolnick exuberantly captures the frustrations and triumphs of scholars as they puzzle out the meaning of long-dead runes.”
Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World finds Dolnick examining the earliest discoveries of dinosaurs. It begins in 1802, when a Massachusetts boy finds petrified dinosaur tracks. Shortly after, other prehistoric evidence is discovered, including fossils found by Mary Anning in Lyme Regis, England and megalosaurus identified by Oxford professor William Buckland. Dolnick profiles other discoverer and highlights shifts in theories about Earth’s age that occurred over centuries. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party as an “exuberant tale” and “a delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 1998, William Beatty, review of Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis, p. 45; September 15, 2001, Gilbert Taylor, review of Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon, p. 188; May 15, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece, p. 1618; May 1, 2008, Donna Seaman, review of The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p. 63; December 1, 2010, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, p. 18; May 15, 2017, Colleen Mondor, review of The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to daVinci, from Sharks’ Teeth to Frogs’ Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From, p. 4.
Business Week, August 1, 2005, Monica Gagnier, review of The Rescue Artist, p. 104.
Chicago Tribune, August 23, 2008, Wendy Smith, review of The Forger’s Spell.
Christian Science Monitor, August 1, 2008, Mary Wiltenburg, review of The Forger’s Spell, p. 25.
Commentary, May, 2011, John Steele Gordon, review of The Clockwork Universe; September, 2017, John Steele Gordon, “Sex Cells,” review of The Seeds of Life, p. 53.
Denver Post, February 10, 2011, Ann Levin, review of The Clockwork Universe.
Guardian (London, England), April 14, 2007, review of Stealing the Scream: The Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece.
Harper’s, December, 2001, Guy Davenport, review of Down the Great Unknown, p. 74.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2001, review of Down the Great Unknown, p. 1260; May 15, 2005, review of The Rescue Artist, p. 574; May 15, 2008, review of The Forger’s Spell; November 15, 2010, review of The Clockwork Universe; July 15, 2014, review of The Rush: America’s Fevered Quest for Fortune; April 1, 2017, review of The Seeds of Life; November 15, 2021, review of The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone; June 1, 2024, review of Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World.
Library Journal, November 1, 1998, Mary Ann Hughes, review of Madness on the Couch, p. 115; October 1, 2001, John Carver Edwards, review of Down the Great Unknown, p. 120; July 1, 2008, Marcia Welsh, review of The Forger’s Spell, p. 74; November 15, 2010, Marcia R. Franklin, review of The Clockwork Universe, p. 88; November 15, 2013, Neal Wyatt, “It Takes a Thief: True Art Crimes,” review of The Rescue Artist, p. 118; September 1, 2014, Nathan Bender, review of The Rush, p. 119; October, 2021, Edward K. Werner, review of The Writing of the Gods, p. 91.
Newsweek International, July 11, 2005, Jason Overdorf, review of The Rescue Artist, p. 57.
New York Times Book Review, June 22, 2008, Anthony Julius, “The Lying Dutchman,” p. 15; March 25, 2011, Ann Finkbeiner, review of The Clockwork Universe; August 8, 2014, Walter R. Borneman, “Striking It Rich,” review of The Rush; December 5, 2021, Joshua Hammer, “Symbols on a Slab,” review of The Writing of the Gods, p. 66.
Publishers Weekly, September 7, 1998, review of Madness on the Couch, p. 78; September 10, 2001, review of Down the Great Unknown, p. 73; April 11, 2005, review of The Rescue Artist, p. 40; April 28, 2008, review of The Forger’s Spell, p. 122; November 29, 2010, review of The Clockwork Universe, p. 38; May 26, 2014, review of The Rush, p. 49; April 3, 2017, review of The Seeds of Life, p. 65.
Spectator, March 3, 2007, Giles Waterfield, “Colorful Rogues’ Gallery,” review of Stealing the Scream.
Time, June 27, 2005, Richard Lacayo, “Makes You Wanna Holler: An Account of the 1994 Theft of The Scream Examines the Lowbrow World of High-Art Thievery,” p. 71.
Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2011, Alan Hirshfeld, review of The Clockwork Universe; August 8, 2014, Gerard Helferich, review of The Rush.
ONLINE
BookBrowse, http://www.bookbrowse.com/ (November 10, 2014), “An Interview with Edward Dolnick.”
Edward Dolnick website, https://www.edwarddolnick.net (July 10, 2024).
Straight.com, http://www.straight.com/ (October 1, 2005), Alexander Varty, review of The Rescue Artist.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://blogs.wsj.com/ (February 9, 2011), author interview.*
I grew up in a small town outside Boston, called Marblehead, and spent a not-so-productive childhood dreaming, in more or less equal proportions, about a career as a professional basketball player and as a sailor on a whaling ship.
Alas, it was not to be. I ended up a journalist and eventually became the chief science writer at the Boston Globe. From newspapers it was on to magazines and eventually to books. The magazines ranged from journals that died before they ever saw a news-stand to such perennials as The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. The stories ranged just as broadly. I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic on the science of dreams and how Freud had it all wrong, and I wrote the first story on “the French paradox,” about how it is that the French gulp down croissants and paté but manage somehow to have only half the rate of heart disease that Americans do.
For about a decade now, I’ve concentrated almost exclusively on books. The first was on psychology—Madness on the Couch, it was called, and it looked (critically) at Freud’s legacy. Next came Down the Great Unknown, the true story of one of the epic adventures in American history. A one-armed ex-soldier named John Wesley Powell led a band of nine novices down the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, in rowboats. None of the men had ever seen a rapid.
Then came a four year stint in the art underworld. The Rescue Artist is a cops and robbers story—focused on a team of bumblers who stole The Scream—about the thieves who snatch masterpieces and the cops who chase them. The Forger’s Spell is a stranger-than-fiction story, set in occupied Holland during World War II, of a Dutch forger who made millions from his fake Vermeers.
After art came The Clockwork Universe, a return to my roots. (I have a master’s degree in math, from MIT.) It’s about Isaac Newton and Leibniz and the Royal Society—the story of a quarrelsome band of geniuses in powdered wigs and knee-length breeches who helped create the world we know today. The backdrop is Europe during the black plague, and the Great Fire of London, and Louis XIV in high heels and gold-embroidered waistcoat at Versailles.
Next came The Rush, a close-up look at the California gold rush. In 1849 the world went mad For the first time ever, an ordinary person could transform his life. The Declaration of Independence had given every American the right to pursue happiness. The gold rush promised the chance to catch it.
When I’m not writing, I spend considerable time trying to civilize a houseful of dogs. The leader of the pack, at present, is a 140-pound Great Pyrenees with a pathological fear of loud noises. Blue combines the noble appearance of a carved lion with the temperament of a hummingbird on speed.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward Dolnick
Born Edward Ishmael Dolnick
November 10, 1952 (age 71)
Nationality American
Alma mater Brandeis University (BA)
Occupation Writer
Children Ben Dolnick
Samuel Dolnick
Relatives Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg (mother-in-law)
Edward Ishmael Dolnick (born November 10, 1952) is an American writer, formerly a science writer at the Boston Globe. He has been published in Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
Dolnick's book The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (2005)—an account of the 1994 theft, and eventual recovery, of Edvard Munch's The Scream from Norway's National Gallery in Oslo—won the 2006 Edgar Award in the Best Crime Fact category. His 2008 book, The Forger's Spell, describes the 1930-1940s forging of Johannes Vermeer paintings by a critic-detesting Dutch artist, accepted as "masterpieces" by art experts until the artist's confession and trial in 1945.
Personal life
In 1973, he married Lynn Iphigene Golden in a Jewish ceremony in Marblehead, Massachusetts.[1] Golden is the daughter of publisher Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg of the Ochs-Sulzberger family,[2][1] publishers of The New York Times, and is on the board of The New York Times Company.[3] The couple lives in the Washington, D.C. area and has two children: author Benjamin Dolnick and Samuel Dolnick. Samuel is an associate editor at The New York Times.[4]
Selected works
Books
Madness on the Couch : Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (1998)
Down the Great Unknown : John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2001).
The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (2005)
The Forger’s Spell : A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (2008)
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (2011).
The Rush: America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853 (2014)
The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks' Teeth to Frogs' Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From (2017)
The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone (2021)
QUOTED: "Dolnick presents a fast-paced intellectual adventure for general readers."
"highly recommended for anyone who relishes challenging puzzles."
Dolnick, Edward. The Writing of the Gods: The Race To Decode the Rosetta Stone. Scribner. Oct. 2021.336p. ISBN 9781501198939. $28. ARCHAEOL
The year 2022 will mark the bicentennial of the modern decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, which unlocked many aspects of that ancient civilization. This new volume by journalist Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World) is an account of the breakthrough. He explains that its key was the 1799 discovery at Rashid (called Rosetta by Europeans) in the Nile Delta of a broken stela, by soldiers from Napoleon's army. The Rosetta Stone, as it has come to be called in the Western world, bears a trilingual text in ancient Greek and Egyptian demotic and hieroglyphic. Copies of the text were made and disseminated among European scholars to attempt to decipher the two Egyptian inscriptions. Dolnick focuses particularly on the intense rivalry between two of those savants'. Englishman Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832). Both compared royal names appearing in the stone's Greek and hieroglyphic texts and discovered that hieroglyphs weren't just ideograms but representations of sounds. For more on Champollion, one might seek out Andrew Robinson's outstanding biography Cracking the Egyptian Code. VERDICT Dolnick presents a fast-paced intellectual adventure for general readers that surveys the invention of writing and the processes of deciphering and decoding. Highly recommended for anyone who relishes challenging puzzles.--Edward K. Werner, formerly at St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., FL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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"Dolnick, Edward. The Writing of the Gods: The Race To Decode the Rosetta Stone." Library Journal, vol. 146, no. 10, Oct. 2021, pp. 91+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A678265052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3ad2f4e8. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "an engrossing account" "another intricate intellectual caper"
"Dolnick exuberantly captures the frustrations and triumphs of scholars as they puzzle out the meaning of long-dead runes."
THE WRITING OF THE GODSThe Race to Decode the Rosetta StoneBy Edward Dolnick
On a steamy day in July 1799, a member of a French military work detail at a tumbledown fort in the Nile Delta made an unusual discovery. Amid a pile of rubble being used for a renovation project, he noticed a 4-foot-by-3-foot granite slab, covered on one side with intricate inscriptions. Lt. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, sensed its significance and turned it over to scholars for analysis.
The nearly one-ton stela, experts determined, had come from a temple dedicated to the Greek-Egyptian King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C. And the three bands of text -- classical Greek, hieroglyphs and an Egyptian shorthand called Demotic -- were intended to proclaim the monarch's achievements in multiple tongues to the peoples of the empire. All three were dead languages, but the Greek alphabet was still in use. The discovery of the slab, called the Rosetta Stone after the town in which it was found, reignited the ultimate linguistic challenge: deciphering the symbols of the Pharaohs.
Edward Dolnick's ''The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone'' is an engrossing account of the 20-year competition that followed. A former science writer for The Boston Globe and the author of books about Isaac Newton and a Dutch art forger who duped the Nazis, Dolnick here conjures up another intricate intellectual caper. With its thrilling dissection of the decoding process, it calls to mind Margalit Fox's ''The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code'' (2013), about three scholars who deciphered Linear B, the 3,400-year-old script excavated from the ruins of Crete's Minoan civilization. Like Fox, Dolnick exuberantly captures the frustrations and triumphs of scholars as they puzzle out the meaning of long-dead runes, ''seduced by tantalizing clues and then careening into dead ends and losing hope, but then spotting new markers and dashing off jubilantly once more.''
From the time of the Roman Empire, linguists had tried, with no success, to figure out what hieroglyphs had to say. The spread of Christianity hastened the disappearance of anything to do with ancient Egypt: In A.D. 391, Theodosius the Great ordered Egyptian temples to be smashed, and the last hieroglyph was carved into a temple on an island in the Nile in 394.
The language quickly fell into oblivion. Horapallo, a fifth-century Egyptian priest, believed that each pictograph had a deep hidden meaning, and he engaged in wild stabs in the dark to figure out what that was. A hawk must symbolize a god, he posited, because birds fly on a slant and ''only the hawk flies straight upward.'' A hare connotes ''open'' because it seemed never to shut its eyes. Others ventured up similarly blind alleys, stumped by symbols that offered no clues about whether they were to be read phonetically, or stood for ideas. ''Suppose the last English speaker had died 20 centuries ago,'' Dolnick writes. ''How would anyone ever learn that the sounds c-a-t pronounced in quick succession meant 'furry animal with whiskers'?''
All that changed with the Rosetta Stone. British forces captured the slab from Napoleon's army in Egypt in 1802 and shipped it to the British Museum, initiating a quest by two geniuses to unlock the code. Thomas Young was a British polymath who excelled in both physics and linguistics; Jean-François Champollion, who grew up in a provincial French backwater during the revolution, was fixated on all things Egyptian.
The last half of Dolnick's tale focuses on the race between the two, marked by surface cordiality and behind-the-scenes back-stabbing. Young deduced that a sequence of pictographs contained inside an oval frame, or cartouche, spelled ''Ptolemy.'' Yet he couldn't make the next leap, recognizing that the writing system was mostly a phonetic alphabet. Champollion drew on his fluency in Coptic -- descended from ancient Egyptian -- to tease out letters, syllables and larger meanings.
''This was 'Wheel of Fortune' without Vanna White,'' Dolnick writes with typical breeziness, ''but with a prize of eternal fame.'' From that point, the millenniums-long battle was largely won. But Dolnick's stirring account makes it clear that both decoders deserve scholarly immortality.
Joshua Hammer is the author of ''The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu'' and ''The Falcon Thief.'' THE WRITING OF THE GODS The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone By Edward Dolnick Illustrated. 311 pp. Scribner. $28.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: The Rosetta Stone, at the British Museum. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Hammer, Joshua. "Symbols on a Slab." The New York Times Book Review, 5 Dec. 2021, p. 66(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A685170488/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2f9d8135. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "a largely engaging ... look at language and the limits of what we can understand."
Dolnick, Edward THE WRITING OF THE GODS Scribner (NonFiction None) $28.00 10, 19 ISBN: 978-1-5011-9893-9
The story of the Rosetta Stone's discovery and decoding.
Today, the Rosetta Stone occupies such a prominent role in public interest--not unlike Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids--that its actual significance can easily get lost amid the crowds of tourists clamoring for a view. In his latest book, Dolnick, former chief science writer for the Boston Globewho has written for a wide variety of publications, offers a strong corrective, describing not only how the Rosetta Stone was found, but also how, over several long decades, it was deciphered. He creates an engaging portrait of the two men--Jean-Fran�ois Champollion and Thomas Young--who were mainly responsible for cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs. For centuries, those hieroglyphs had been unreadable. Dolnick provides an exciting narrative of the journey to legibility, and he effectively describes why it was such an important--and excruciating--process. However, the author sometimes goes awry when he strains too hard for wittiness--e.g., describing ancient Alexandria as "Paris to Rome's Podunk." Worse are the banalities that stud Dolnick's analyses. "If you pull the camera back far enough," he writes, "all cultures look the same. People meet and fall in love; they boast and puff themselves up; they mock their rivals; they pray to their god, or a host of gods; they fear death. The details make all the difference." Accessibility is no crime, of course, but the author's desire to make the book accessible to everyone leads him to oversimplify his subject with labored asides: "Imagine how much harder crossword puzzles would be if the answers could be in any language including dead ones." Despite these flaws, Dolnick makes complicated linguistic challenges not only comprehensible, but also especially vivid for readers new to the subject, and, as in his previous books, his enthusiasm is infectious.
A largely engaging yet sometimes pedestrian look at language and the limits of what we can understand.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Dolnick, Edward: THE WRITING OF THE GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A682168309/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2eb5d217. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "exuberant tale" "a delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history."
Dolnick, Edward DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY Scribner (NonFiction None) $30.00 8, 6 ISBN: 9781982199616
Dinosaurs and the birth of paleontology.
Dolnick, former Boston Globe chief science writer and author of The Clockwork Universe and The Forger's Spell, begins his latest exuberant tale in 1802, when "something ominous shrieked in the night" in Massachusetts: A young boy had discovered petrified tracks. At the time, "no one had ever heard of dinosaurs." Soon, others began uncovering fossils, and science called for answers to these mysterious relics. In one of the narrative's first intriguing profiles, the author introduces us to Mary Anning, who was good at finding and selling fossils, massive plesiosaur, in the resort town of Lyme Regis. As Dolnick recounts, England's "God-soaked people," including scientists, had a hard time grappling with the riddles of time, fossils, and Noah's Ark. In 1665, Robert Hooke broke through first, arguing that "fossils were relics of living organisms," but finding them was difficult. In 1796, naturalist Georges Cuvier boldly stated that "extinction was a fact," while Jean-Baptiste Lamarck recognized that "species do change" and Charles Lyell argued that the Earth is very old. A scientist author's 1830 watercolor was the "first depiction of animals in a world before humans." A few years earlier, the eccentric William Buckland, Oxford's first professor of geology, identified the megalosaurus. He also argued that glaciers once covered Earth, and it was "those glaciers, not a flood, that had reshaped the world." Prolific fossil hunter Gideon Mantell, discoverer of the iguanodon, boldly proposed England had a tropical, "remote, sultry past." At the time, scientists were close to stumbling on evolution. Fossil fanatic Thomas Jefferson named his own giant sloth, and America had their giant mammoth, which was exhibited in London. In 1842, anatomist Richard Owen invented a new word to describe the animals--dinosaurs. Darwin was just around the corner.
A delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Dolnick, Edward: DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673953/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=20bd3f46. Accessed 27 June 2024.