Contemporary Authors

1. Conan Doyle for the defense : the true story of a sensational British murder, a quest for justice, and the world's most famous detective writer LCCN 2017058151 Type of material Book Personal name Fox, Margalit, author. Main title Conan Doyle for the defense : the true story of a sensational British murder, a quest for justice, and the world's most famous detective writer / Margalit Fox. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Random House, 2018. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780399589454 (hardback) CALL NUMBER HV9960.G72 G533 2018 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The riddle of the labyrinth : the quest to crack an ancient code LCCN 2013404394 Type of material Book Personal name Fox, Margalit, author. Main title The riddle of the labyrinth : the quest to crack an ancient code / Margalit Fox. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Ecco, An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2013] ©2013 Description xx, 363 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm ISBN 9780062228833 (hbk.) 0062228838 (hbk.) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1406/2013404394-b.html Shelf Location FLM2015 167621 CALL NUMBER P1038 .F69 2013 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Talking hands : what sign language reveals about the mind LCCN 2007017624 Type of material Book Personal name Fox, Margalit. Main title Talking hands : what sign language reveals about the mind / Margalit Fox. Published/Created New York : Simon & Schuster, c2007. Description viii, 354 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780743247122 0743247124 Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0717/2007017624.html Sample text http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0728/2007017624-s.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0729/2007017624-d.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1107/2007017624-b.html CALL NUMBER P117 .F69 2007 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER P117 .F69 2007 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia -

  Margalit Fox
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  Margalit Fox (born 1961) is an American writer. She began her career in publishing in the 1980s, before switching to journalism in the 1990s. She joined the obituary department of The New York Times in 2004, and authored over 1,400 obituaries before her retirement from the paper in 2018. Fox has written three non-fiction books and plans to pursue book writing full time.

  Contents
  1
  Biography
  2
  Bibliography
  2.1
  Books
  2.2
  Notable obituaries
  3
  References
  4
  External links
  Biography[edit]
  Fox was born in Glen Cove, New York, the daughter of David (a physicist) and Laura Fox.[1] She attended Barnard College in New York City and then Stony Brook University, where she completed her bachelor's degree (1982) and then a master's degree in linguistics in 1983. She received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1991.[2] Fox also studied the cello.[3]
  In the 1980s, before attending journalism school, Fox worked in book and magazine publishing.[3] She joined The New York Times in 1994 as a copy editor for its Book Review.[4][5] She has written widely on language, culture and ideas for The New York Times, New York Newsday, Variety and other publications. Her work was anthologized in Best Newspaper Writing, 2005.[2][6] Fox moved to the obituary department of The New York Times in 2004.[3] There she wrote over 1,400 obituaries before retiring as a senior writer in 2018, penning an article for the paper about her own retirement. She plans to pursue book writing full-time.[5]
  In 2011, The Newswomen's Club of New York awarded Fox its Front Page Award for her collection of work at The New York Times.[7] In 2014, she won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her book The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. The New York Times also ranked the book as one of the "100 Notable Books of 2013."[6] In 2014, The Paris Review called Fox "An instrumental figure in pushing the obituary past Victorian-era formal constraints".[4] In its 2015 roundup of "Best journalism of 2015", Sports Illustrated referred to her as "The great NYT obit writer".[8] In 2016, Atlantic Monthly described her as "the finest obituarist at The New York Times".[9] Calling her "The Artist of the Obituary", Andrew Ferguson wrote in Commentary magazine: "Margalit Fox is one of those writers ... whose every paragraph carries an undercurrent of humor ... you’re never more than a few sentences away from an ironic aside or wry observation or the sudden appearance of some cockeyed fact. ... Stranger still, Fox maintains her writerly bounce despite her regular subject, which is death. ...Fox is ... the best writer all around, at the New York Times.[10]
  Fox has said: "In the course of an obit, you’re charged with taking your subject from the cradle to the grave, which gives you a natural narrative arc. ... 98 percent of the obit has nothing to do with death, but with life. ... We like to say it’s the jolliest department in the paper."[4] Fox is featured in Vanessa Gould's 2016 documentary film Obit about the New York Times obituary staff.[11]
  She is married to writer and critic George Robinson.[2]
  Bibliography[edit]
  Books[edit]
  Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind , Simon & Schuster (2007) ISBN 978-0-7432-4712-2
  The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, Ecco Press (2013) ISBN 978-0-0622-2883-3
  Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer, Random House (2018) ISBN 9780399589454
  Notable obituaries[edit]
  Virginia Hamilton Adair[12]
  Betty Allen[13]
  Maya Angelou[5]
  Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.[14]
  Christine Brooke-Rose[15]
  Joyce Brothers[16]
  Robert N. Buck[17]
  Robert L. Chapman[18]
  Lili Chookasian[19]
  Hugues Cuénod[20]
  Leo and Diane Dillon[21]
  Patty Duke[22]
  Betty Friedan[11]
  John Gardner (British writer)[23]
  Jim Gary[24]
  Dorothy Gilman[25]
  Crawford Hallock Greenewalt, Jr.[26]
  Arthur Haggerty[27]
  Seamus Heaney[5]
  Fred Kilgour[28]
  Kurt Masur[29]
  Anne McCaffrey[30]
  René A. Morel[31]
  Patricia Neway[32]
  Ingrid Pitt[33]
  Chaim Potok[34]
  Anneliese Rothenberger[35]
  Albert Schatz (scientist)[36]
  Jane Scott[37]
  Tony Scott (musician)[38]
  Rudi Stern[39]
  Kirtanananda Swami[40]
  Keith Tantlinger[41]
  Dave Tatsuno[42]
  Marie Tharp[43]
  Blanche Thebom[44]
  Dolores Wilson[45]
  Frances Yeend[46]

• Times of Israel - https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-7-best-jewish-obituaries-by-new-york-times-writer-margalit-fox/

  The 7 best Jewish obituaries by New York Times writer Margalit Fox
  Veteran writer announces she's leaving the 'Gray Lady,' after writing farewells to some 1,400 people as part of her 'dead beat'
  By Josefin Dolsten
  3 July 2018, 6:00 am
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  FILE - This Oct. 10, 2012, file photo shows the New York Times building in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
  NEW YORK (JTA) — New York Times obituary writer Margalit Fox announced she was leaving her position after writing farewells to more than 1,400 notable, notorious or downright unusual people over a 14-year span. Fox intends to turn to book-writing full time.
  Among the highlights of her time on the “dead beat” were obituaries of Jewish newsmakers, which, like so many of her obits, stand out for the vividness of her prose and the humor she sometimes brought to solemn moments. Here are some standouts.
  Rabbi Sol Steinmetz
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  Steinmetz was a widely respected Jewish Hungarian-American expert in linguistics and lexicography who wrote about both English and Yiddish. The ordained rabbi was the executive editor of Random House’s dictionary division; journalists frequently called on him as an expert “on matters semantical, grammatical, and etymological.” Steinmetz likely would have enjoyed his obituary by Fox, with its definitions and derivations of words, dictionary-style.

  Fox wrote: “Writing in The New York Times in 2006, William Safire, who knew from language mavens, called Mr. Steinmetz a ‘lexical supermaven,’ an accolade that in two scant words draws exuberantly on Greek, Latin, Yiddish and Hebrew. (‘Maven,’ Yiddish for cognoscente, derives from the Hebrew noun mevin, ‘one who knows.’)”

  Margalit Fox (Screen capture: YouTube)
  Debbie Friedman
  The Jewish singer-songwriter helped create beautiful folky melodies for traditional prayers that invigorated American Jewish life across the denominational spectrum. Fox’s obituary highlighted these creations and also brought to light the fact that Friedman was a lesbian — a fact known to some that Friedman had preferred to keep private during her lifetime. The obituary’s mention of Friedman’s sexuality ignited a debate about whether she had been right to keep it a secret.
  “Many of her English lyrics concerned the empowerment of women and other disenfranchised groups, stemming, her associates said on Monday, from the quiet pride she took in her life as a gay woman.”

  Debbie Friedman (Screen capture: YouTube)
  Moshe Landau
  Landau was the presiding judge in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. During the 1961 trial, Eichmann sat in a bulletproof glass booth and ultimately was sentenced to death by hanging. Fox’s obituary highlights the fact that Landau himself was a refugee from Nazi Germany, his actions during the trial and his career afterward, as president of Israel’s Supreme Court.
  “On one occasion, as The New York Times reported, Justice Landau became impatient with the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, after Mr. Hausner called witnesses who testified about horrors in Polish and Lithuanian ghettos. According to the parameters set by the indictment, these narratives were not strictly germane to the case. ‘I know it is difficult to cut short such testimony,’ Justice Landau told Mr. Hausner in open court. ‘But it is your duty, Sir, to brief the witness, to explain to him that all external elements must be removed that do not pertain to this trial.’”

  Maurice Sendak
  In a long obituary for the prominent children’s book author, Fox touches on Sendak’s way of making dark, serious themes accessible to children and how his books were received (sometimes skeptically). She notes that the creatures in his best-known book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” were inspired by the Jewish relatives “who hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the childhood sickbed to which he was often confined.” She also mentions melancholy aspects of his background, including how he hid his sexuality from his parents.
  “As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. ‘All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,’ he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. ‘They never, never, never knew.’”

  Maurice Sendak posing in 1985 with one of the characters from his book “Where the Wild Things Are,”(AP)
  Irving Cohen
  One of the lesser-known people on this list, Cohen was said to be “the borscht belt’s longest-serving maître d’hôtel” and a prolific matchmaker. Fox writes about how Cohen, who worked at the Concord Resort Hotel in Kiamesha Lake, New York, for some 60 years, had an ability to quickly size up and then set up Jewish singles in search of love, resulting in “thousands of marriages.”
  “‘You got to pair them by states and even from the same cities,’ Mr. Cohen told The Daily News in 1967. ‘If they come from different places, the doll is always afraid the guy will forget her as soon as he gets home.’ To keep track of demographic information, Mr. Cohen used a specially built pegboard, 10 feet long, on which each of the Concord’s hundreds of dining tables was represented by a circle.”
  Rabbi Hershel Schachter
  Schachter was the first US Army chaplain to enter and participate in the liberation of Buchenwald. That experience would continue to haunt Schachter, an Orthodox rabbi who played a prominent role in American Jewish life, including as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Fox’s obituary recalls Schachter’s entry into Buchenwald and the devastation he saw there.
  “There, in filthy barracks, men lay on raw wooden planks stacked from floor to ceiling. They stared down at the rabbi, in his unfamiliar military uniform, with unmistakable fright. ‘Shalom Aleichem, Yidden,’ Rabbi Schacter cried in Yiddish, ‘ihr zint frei!’ — ‘Peace be upon you, Jews, you are free!’ He ran from barracks to barracks, repeating those words. He was joined by those Jews who could walk, until a stream of people swelled behind him.”

  Rabbi Hershel Schachter, right, of New York, chairman of the American Jewish Conference at the opening session in Brussels, Belgium of a three day world conference of Jewish communities on Soviet Jewry on February 23, 1971. (AP Photo)
  Judy Protas
  Protas, a retired advertising executive at Doyle Dane Bernbach, was the writer behind the iconic advertising campaign to sell Levy’s rye bread beyond its natural Jewish customer base. The best-known campaign featured a diverse group, including an African-American boy, Asian- and Native American men and a choirboy, proclaiming that “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye.”

  “Though its evocative tagline is often credited to William Bernbach, a founder of DDB, or to Phyllis Robinson, the agency’s chief copywriter, period newspaper accounts and contemporary archival sources make clear that the actual writing fell to Ms. Protas, who, working quietly and out of the limelight, set down those dozen durable words.”

• Talking Hands website - http://www.talkinghandsbook.com/theauthor.html

  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. Through her mentor at Stony Brook, the distinguished linguist Mark Aronoff, she first became aware of the remarkable "signing village" of Al-Sayyid, the community at the heart of Talking Hands. Margalit is one of only a few journalists in the world to have set foot in the village, and the only one to publish firsthand reporting on its extraordinary life and language.
  At The Times, Margalit is a reporter in the celebrated Obituary News department, where she has written send-offs of some of the leading cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the literary critic Wayne C. Booth and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the man who invented the crash-test dummy, the textile conservator who washed Napoleon’s nightshirt and the home economist who invented Stove Top Stuffing.
  Reprinted in newspapers throughout North America and around the world, Margalit’s work has been anthologized in Best Newspaper Writing, 2005 and elsewhere. She is also featured in The Dead Beat (HarperCollins, 2006), the recent popular book by Marilyn Johnson about the pleasures of obituaries.
  Previously an editor at The New York Times Book Review, Margalit has written numerous articles on language, culture and ideas for The Times, New York Newsday, Variety and other publications. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
  Talking Hands is her first book.

  Frequently Asked Questions

  How did you come to write Talking Hands?
  As a journalist with two degrees in linguistics, I enjoy combining my two fields whenever possible and writing about language for the general reader. For years, I’ve dreamed of writing a popular book about language that would be universally accessible yet contain the scientific insights—and the narrative elegance—of a book by Oliver Sacks or John McPhee. But for years, no compelling enough topic presented itself.
  In the summer of 2001, I was having lunch with Mark Aronoff, an internationally renowned linguist and my former academic adviser. I was telling him about my desire to write such a book, and bemoaning the lack of a suitable topic. Let’s face it: I was whining.
  “Come with us,” Mark said.
  That was when he told me about the research project that is the centerpiece of Talking Hands. With three colleagues, Mark had been working secretly in Al-Sayyid, a remote Bedouin village where, as the result of an abnormally high incidence of hereditary deafness, an indigenous sign language had sprung up, “spoken” by deaf and hearing people alike. It was a language few outsiders had ever seen. By decoding this mysterious language, Mark and his colleagues hoped to isolate the most basic ingredients from which all human languages, signed and spoken, are made.
  But tagging along with the scientists turned out to be no simple matter. After nearly a year of trans-Atlantic negotiations with the research team’s leader, Professor Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa (I literally flew to Europe, where she was then working, for a single day, just to take her to lunch and plead my case), I was finally granted permission to accompany the team on a visit to the signing village in the summer of 2003. The story of that trip — a journey to a village where everyone speaks sign language — is the narrative heart of Talking Hands.
  What are sign languages, anyway? Did someone sit down and invent them?
  The sign languages that Deaf people speak every day are real, natural languages, as grammatical complex and fully human as any spoken language. No one sat down and invented them. Instead, they arose spontaneously in places where Deaf people had the opportunity to congregate, and have evolved historically over time, just as spoken languages do. (Sign languages even have regional and ethnic dialects!)
  Is there one universal sign language, used by Deaf people around the world?
  No. Nearly every country has its own national sign language, each one different from the next. Today, there are scores of sign languages in use around the globe, possibly hundreds, from American Sign Language to British Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, German Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language, Turkish Sign Language, Israeli Sign Language, Saudi Arabian Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Hong Kong Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Mozambiquan Sign Language, Zimbabwean Sign Language, and more.
  Is American Sign Language simply a manual version of English?
  No. ASL, the language of a quarter- to a half-million North Americans, is an autonomous language that evolved independently of English, with its own grammatical structure. (Linguists have compared aspects of ASL grammar to Japanese and Navajo.) Strikingly, ASL and British Sign Language, though both used in English-speaking countries, are mutually unintelligible. A Deaf American will actually have an easier time understanding a Deaf Frenchman: ASL is historically descended from French Sign Language.
  Why do signers seem to grimace while they’re signing?
  Those facial expressions are actually a crucial part of sign-language grammar. In the sign languages of the world, the face, head and eyes play a vital role, conveying extra grammatical information—turning a declarative sentence into a question, for example—while the signer’s hands are “busy talking.”
  Which side of the brain controls sign language — the right, where our visual and spatial faculties lie, or the left, where spoken-language ability resides?
  That was the fundamental question confronting the first sign-language researchers in the 1970’s and 80’s. It was an open question whether sign language was controlled by the right half of the brain or the left, and persuasive arguments could be made on both sides. Then, one brilliant scientist was inspired to study Deaf signers who had suffered strokes. The findings were astonishing — and they answered the question once and for all. I explore these studies of the signing brain in detail in Chapter 16 of Talking Hands.
  What was it like going to the village of Al-Sayyid? Exactly where is it, anyway?
  Al-Sayyid (pronounced es-SAYY-id) is hot, dusty and like nowhere else on earth. You reach it from a series of ever-narrower, unmarked dirt roads, miles from the nearest town. There are olive groves, and grazing sheep and goats, all around. A typical village home might consist of two simple rooms in a whitewashed, tin-roofed building. The head of the household might have three wives (the community is polygamous) and twenty children, six of whom are deaf. Inside, you sit on the floor on hand-loomed rugs, drinking sweet tea and eating a meal of fragrant kebabs and homemade pita bread, and watch, amazed, as a dozen lively conversations—all in sign language, used by deaf and hearing members of the family alike—erupt in the air around you. Then you look up to see a camel shambling by the front door. Definitely a not-in-Kansas-anymore feeling!
  As for the location of the village, all I can say is this: Al-Sayyid is somewhere in Israel. The four scientists working there are, understandably, quite adamant that the villagers’ privacy be protected. As a result, I have disguised the precise location of Al-Sayyid in my book. Consider the village a kind of signing Brigadoon, impossible for any outsider to find. But Al-Sayyid is very real, and Talking Hands will take you there.
  Why is the language of a “signing village” like Al-Sayyid so crucially important to science?
  A brand-new, indigenous sign language like that of Al-Sayyid, offers scientists an unprecedented opportunity to see the human “language instinct” in action—to watch what happens when the mind has to make a language from scratch.
  As Wendy Sandler, one of the four scientists profiled in Talking Hands says: “A linguist never has the opportunity to see how language is born. All spoken languages are either thousands of years old or came about as a result of contact between languages that are thousands of years old. So in spoken language there is no such thing—there can be no such thing—as a new language born of nothing. Only in a sign-language situation can that happen. If you get a deaf community, then a language will be born, and there are no other languages in the environment that are accessible.”
  Are there other “signing villages”?
  Yes — about a dozen at last count, all in remote corners of the world. Scientific work in these villages is just barely beginning. At the end of Talking Hands, I take readers to an international meeting of researchers who are studying these “signing villages,” the first time in history that all of them had convened in one place. And, as scientists are now learning, there may be even more of these “signing villages” out there than anyone ever realized, waiting to be discovered... .
  Why is the study of sign language in general such a hot topic in cognitive science?
  For decades, everything that scientists knew about the structure of human language (and, by extension, everything they knew about how language works in the human mind), came from the study of spoken language. Sign languages, to the extent that anyone thought about them at all, weren’t considered languages: ASL was only discovered to be a “real” language in 1960! And only in the 70’s did scientists fully realize that this language in another modality—a language transmitted by hand and received by eye—held deep, surprising clues to the kinds of mental systems that all human languages belong to.
  Today, the study of signed languages is revealing dramatic new evidence of how all language, signed and spoken, is processed, stored and remembered in the mind.
  What did the mysterious sign language of Al-Sayyid turn out to reveal about the structure of human language?
  That is the $64,000 question. For the answer, you’ll have to read the book!

• Observer - http://observer.com/2018/02/new-york-times-obituaries-margalit-fox/

  Outgoing NY Times Obit Writer Margalit Fox Talks Her Career and ‘Suicide by Jaguar’
  By John Bonazzo • 02/28/18 6:00am

  Margalit Fox. YouTube/Mercatus Center
  It’s time to write the post mortem on Margalit Fox.
  Oh, The New York Times‘ senior obituary writer isn’t dead (thank goodness). But after 24 years at the Gray Lady, the 56-year-old is moving on.
  “Through a series of very happy accidents, I made my career at a daily newspaper,” she told Observer. “But it wasn’t an area of journalism I ever expected to work in, and especially not for over two decades.”
  As such, Fox is leaving the Times at the end of June to focus full-time on book writing. Her departure coincides with the release of her third book Conan Doyle for the Defense, the story of how the creator of Sherlock Holmes overturned an innocent man’s murder conviction.
  Fox started her career at the Times in 1994 as an editor for the Book Review. She moved to the obituary desk in 2004 and has written almost 1,400 obits since then.
  “It’s the job nobody thinks they want, a kind of Siberia,” Fox said. “But it’s the best beat in journalism because you’re paid to tell peoples’ stories.
  Fox has gained a reputation as one of the best storytellers on the web—in fact, the Times has submitted her for Pulitzer Prizes twice. Soon after the paper sent a press release about her departure, Twitter was filled with tributes to her greatest hits.
  While obituaries have to be reported and fact checked like any other news story, Fox said two things set them apart.
  “Obits are the most purely narrative genre in daily journalism,” she said. “We are charged with taking our subjects from the cradle to the grave.
  All obituaries also require social context.
  “You can use the lens of an individual life to talk about how culture changed,” Fox said.
  She has several favorite examples of this, including John Fairfax, an adventurer who crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in a rowboat.
  One section of the obit in particular, which mentioned Fairfax’s attempt to commit “suicide by jaguar,” lit up social media. Many people called it the most “badass” obit they’d ever read.
  Another one of Fox’s favorites was a profile of Janet Wolfe, an Upper West Side mainstay who was the subject of many New Yorker “Talk of the Town” columns.
  Her job hasn’t always been that easy: she’s also had to write obits for Nazi war criminals and killers like Charles Manson.
  “When you come home, you want to take a shower and wash those people off you,” Fox said. “But they have to be done, and they have to be done right.”
  Fox also writes advance obits for notable people who haven’t died yet—she’ll be leaving dozens of them behind when she leaves the paper. The Times has 1,900 advance obits in all, for politicians, authors, athletes and movie stars.

  The Times has sometimes been caught by surprise by celebrity deaths like Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson. In those instances, Fox had to do her job a lot faster than usual.
  “I had one arm in the coat sleeve at 7 or 8 p.m., and then my editor said ‘Sit back down,'” she said. “I had to inhale someone’s life in an hour.”
  Ironically, Fox never had to complete the common English class assignment to write her own obituary. And she said she’s not about to start now.
  “It would be the ultimate journalistic conflict of interest,” she said.
  Fox said she hoped her own obit would say she was “a decent stylist who didn’t mess up too many times.”
  And she doesn’t mind that her own life wasn’t as exotic as those of her obit subjects.
  “If I were to have a jaguar, I’d want it to be the kind with four wheels and a capital J,” Fox said.

• Medium - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/margalit-fox-obituary-writer-new-york-times-f4169ede40

  Mercatus CenterFollow
  The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas.
  Aug 24, 2016

  TYLER COWEN: Today I am with Margalit Fox at Chelsea Market. One of my readers wrote to me about Margalit, “She is by far the best writer amongst all those employed by the New York Times.” She is arguably the most humorous writer, has the best sense of irony, and the most inventive writer.
  She is, in fact, one of the main writers of obituaries for the New York Times. She also has written two very well-reviewed books, has a third book coming out about historical true crime in Edwardian England, and I’m here to talk with Margalit Fox. Welcome.
  MARGALIT FOX: Thank you very much, Tyler.
  COWEN: The fact that you write obituaries makes you especially interesting. And my first question has to do with human lives. How well do you feel family and friends actually know a person? You get to know them fairly well when you write their obit. How well do others know them, those closest to them?

  FOX: Of course, those closest to them are the ones by definition who know them best. And so, for various reasons, including just one of basic reporting smarts, we are obliged to spend time on the phone with families and close friends where there are such people to be had.
  COWEN: But how often is the family or the close friends surprised by what’s in the obituary? Divorces they didn’t know about; children they didn’t know about; they may have been an alcoholic when they were in their 20s; something they did in their career.
  FOX: Remember that we the reporter are starting almost always from an agnostic state. Of course, there are essentially two categories of obituaries that the Times does.
  One are the marquee names, the presidents, the kings, the queens, the captains of industry, old-time Hollywood film stars, and so on — people who are in the history books, people whom everyone has heard of. Their lives are well documented, and so there are rarely any surprises, either for the family or for the reporter working on the story.
  On the other hand, there is this whole other category of people whom I call history’s backstage players, these unsung men and women who are not household names but who, because they invented something, had an idea, wrote something, you know, way back perhaps in the 1940s — they put a wrinkle in the social fabric and changed the world.
  I’ve done, for instance, the inventor of the Frisbee, the inventor of Etch A Sketch, the inventor of the plastic lawn flamingo, of Stove Top Stuffing. Now, about those people, although clearly they did something that changed the culture — was transformative in some way — we reporters are almost always going in cold. We’ve very often never heard the name, much less anything about what this person did.
  And so, for that, of course, we’re obliged to rely to an extent, with appropriate double-checking and backstopping, on family knowledge because their knowledge is better and of far, far longer duration than ours.

  Margalit Fox reads her obituary for John Fairfax
  COWEN: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about an ordinary life writing one of these obituaries? Not a famous person but — .
  FOX: Well, here’s one. I brought one with me. There was a very good photographer who worked for the Village Voice for many years, a man named Fred McDarrah. He died in 2007. Now, his work as a photographer for the Voice alone would have been more than enough to get him a news obit in our pages, which it did.
  He took, for instance, a very famous photo of Bob Dylan, a young Bob Dylan all in black, in Sheridan Square Park in New York, facing the camera and saluting. That photo has been everywhere. That was taken by our guy, Fred McDarrah. And because of when he worked in the fifties and sixties, he was famous for documenting photographically the beat generation.
  To my surprise and delight, when I started pulling old clippings and researching the obit, we found that not only did he document the beat generation, but he enterprisingly started a business called Rent-a-Beatnik for these society matrons who wanted to be au courant, wanted to have a beatnik play the bongos or read poetry at their fancy parties in Scarsdale, but didn’t quite know how to go about it.
  COWEN: With rental markets and everything, I would say.
  FOX: Exactly. So the lede of our obit — we say, “Fred W. McDarrah, a self-described square who was a longtime photographer for the Village Voice documented the unwashed exploits of the Beat generation, and as an enterprising freelance talent agent rented out members of that generation (washed or unwashed) to wide-eyed suburban society gatherings, died,” etc., etc. So that was great fun.
  On the structure of obits
  COWEN: One thing I find interesting when I read obituaries is how much subtle humor is in them and how much of an attempt is made to make the first sentence be especially interesting. And often the last sentence contains a kind of nugget or surprise or twist on the story. Now, the other parts of the newspaper typically aren’t like this, be it the New York Times or elsewhere.
  So why do obituaries have this special status where there’s room in them for this kind of humor and invention? Or alternatively, why don’t more parts of the newspaper actually copy this if it works, which I think it typically does?
  FOX: As to what more parts of the newspaper do or don’t do, I can’t speak, but of course, as you know, there are very ironclad conventions for the structure of news articles. Historically, obits were no exception to that. These conventions actually have been in place during the Civil War. And it’s worth digressing about them quickly because they’re quite fascinating.
  Anyone who’s ever taken Journalism 101 has heard about the inverted pyramid, which is this upside-down triangle that’s supposed to be the model for the lede paragraph of any news story and in fact for the structure of the news story as it flows along: broad-based information first and then finer- and finer- and finer-grained detail, down to stuff at the end that you could possibly dispense with if you’re short on space.
  And that model is an information-processing model. It has endured for over a hundred years because it’s cognitively perfect. It came about during Civil War battle coverage, when they had the medium of telegraphy for the first time available to reporters.
  Like much new technology, it was bulky. Lines went down. And reporters learned in a do-or-die sort of way, “Get the broadest information through first, so if the lines go down, at least your readers back in Boston or Baltimore will have something. Your editor will have something to put in the paper.” That model has endured because it’s how we process information. It’s cognitively perfect.
  Obits, too, were beholden to that model, plus weighed down further by all of this boilerplate that has to be there — so-and-so died, when, where, of what illness, at what age. And that is why historically obits were considered one of the most boring sections of any daily paper.
  Happily, in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly we at the Times have realized that underlying all of that potentially very leaden boilerplate is a pure narrative arc. Because what does an obit do? It’s charged with taking subjects from the cradle — John Doe was born on January 1st, 1900 — to the grave — John Doe died yesterday. That gives you a built-in narrative arc.
  And indeed, obits turn out to be the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. The reason we have these great ledes and we hope great kickers, as we call them, at the end is that we are exploiting very happily this inherent narrative potential that is a news obit.

  And indeed, obits turn out to be the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. The reason we have these great ledes and we hope great kickers…at the end is that we are exploiting very happily this inherent narrative potential that is a news obit.

  COWEN: But in terms of the structure of the newspaper, certain rules and procedures have not been imposed on obituaries that are imposed on other news stories. What do you think it is about the nature of obituaries or maybe their role in the newsroom that has allowed that freedom to evolve?
  Because people who report on crimes — you could imagine I’m talking to one of them, and they would say, “This is the perfect narrative arc. We developed all these freedoms” — but typically not. There’s a pretty rigid structure to a crime story.
  FOX: See, I don’t know that I agree with your initial premise because there is also a pretty rigid structure to an obit. It’s there. To put it in Chomskyan terms, in old-time Chomskyan terms, it’s the deep structure. It’s there undergirding everything. Otherwise the story wouldn’t cohere. It would fall apart.
  COWEN: There’s a birth and a death. Right.
  FOX: But all of the stuff is there. The trick is — if you want to make it good art but also have complete fealty to the tenets of journalism, which we must adhere to, the trick is to disguise all of that infrastructure, all of those girders, and to make it — where thematically appropriate — to make it kind of light and frothy and dancing and a really good read.
  COWEN: Now, if I look at a lot of British obituaries, it seems to me they often have a different structure. You can tell me in a moment what you think that difference is. But often I see the death buried in the middle of the British obituary.
  There’s maybe a greater tendency to poke fun at the person who has passed away. Often the obituary won’t be printed — say, several weeks later, which is not, say, how the New York Times typically operates.
  Now, what do you think are the differences between British and American obituaries, and how have they evolved? What accounts for that?
  FOX: That’s a huge question, and because I’m not a historian of journalism, I can’t account for how it’s evolved. That’s beyond my ken. British obituaries and British journalism generally — it’s that Fleet Street model — are more catty than news stories in almost any section of an American paper.
  Again, we have to have complete fealty to the truth. We have to have complete impartiality. We have to be disinterested in the pure sense of the term where we are detached observers. And an obit is no different. But at the same time, because we have wonderful marquee-name writers in our section — Biff Grimes, Bruce Weber, Sam Roberts — .
  COWEN: Margalit Fox.
  FOX: Thank you. We are able to put a really interesting gloss — gloss in perhaps both senses of the term — on top of this basic structure that has to be there.
  On being the gatekeeper for a highly exclusive club
  COWEN: Edward Lowe — he’s the man who invented Kitty Litter. I believe you’ve heard of him. Do you feel he should be more or less famous? In American society as a whole, do you feel the fame incentives for people like Edward Lowe are too strong or too weak?
  FOX: Edward Lowe in 1947, as memorialized in the famous obituary by our late great obit writer Robert McG. Thomas, was the man who, because he had an idea one day, invented the product that became known as Kitty Litter. And it did indeed cause social change because it made cats much easier to keep indoors than formerly. For the first time, a few decades later, cats actually passed dogs as the most popular American pet.
  So, again, here’s somebody who did something spontaneously because he was inspired and who put a wrinkle in the social fabric. He changed the culture. Now, he wasn’t doing it to get famous.
  I don’t — you know, Andy Warhol hadn’t yet said, “In the world of the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” I think very few people about whom we write do things for fame. The fame comes post hoc, applied by people like us in the news media. I don’t think there’s any incentivization of fame for the vast majority of people about whom we write. In fact, it never even occurred to me.
  COWEN: You’re one of the gatekeepers of one of the world’s most exclusive clubs. Numbers I’ve seen — every year about two-and-a-half million Americans pass away. And in that same year, the New York Times might run about, what, a thousand obituaries?
  FOX: Right, for space reasons.
  COWEN: I realize some of this process may be confidential, but apart from the obvious candidates — former presidents and the like — how is it determined who gets covered, who gets entrance into this highly exclusive club? What are the standards, and what kinds of discussions do you have?
  What are some features about a person that maybe wouldn’t be so intuitive to our listeners that actually are quite dispositive for determining whether you let them through the gates?
  FOX: There is no one cookie-cutter model for who gets in and who gets out. How could there be? Lives are so different. Indeed, apart from the people who are the shoo-ins — the presidents, the kings and queens — there is this whole other 90 percent of the iceberg that’s hidden but which we may want to expose in our pages. These are these fascinating backstage players, the inventors of Kitty Litter and the lawn flamingo, etc.
  What we look for generally — and the question that’s asked by our three section editors, who agonize every day over the volume of submissions we get from families, from funeral homes, stories we read in out-of-town papers, foreign papers, the wire services, things come flooding in, and these decisions have to be made every day. Indeed, it’s like a meeting of the admission committee of the most selective university in the world.
  COWEN: And it’s, what, three of you, five of you?
  FOX: There are our section head, Bill McDonald, and his two deputies, Jack Kadden and Peter Keepnews. The editors are charged first and last with the responsibility of deciding who gets in every day and roughly the length, to whom it’s assigned.
  They often do it in consultation with the writers. My original training was as a cellist. I later trained in linguistics. So if they have questions on classical musicians, linguists, they say, “Is this person important? Is this person worth doing?” I may weigh in. My colleagues weigh in similarly in their subject areas.
  The criterion we look for, if we had to pick a single question that can be asked of every applicant at our gates, is: Did he or she change the culture?

  The criterion we look for, if we had to pick a single question that can be asked of every applicant at our gates, is: Did he or she change the culture?

  COWEN: Who invented the lawn flamingo?
  FOX: A very interesting man, a Massachusetts man with the wonderful and appropriate name of Don Featherstone. He trained as a sculptor. He got work in the postwar years at a plastics factory. It’s like that wonderful, famous old line from The Graduate — “I have one word of advice for you: plastics.” Well, he took that advice.
  The plastics factory made all sorts of three-dimensional ornamental pieces for the home. He had the idea — and again, just in a stroke of inspiration — of making a creature that would connote the ongoing pleasure of endless summer. I think we say in the obit “the saturated pink promise of endless summer.” It took off in ways that he never imagined, sold millions and millions and millions, and literally changed the landscape of America.
  COWEN: Now we have the saturated pink promise of endless summer because of him.
  FOX: We do. I mean, perhaps had he not done it, someone else would have. But the point is, he did, and he was transformative enough — albeit in a perhaps campy way when viewed through a postmodern lens. The Times put him on page one.
  COWEN: Take his obituary. Was a version of that written in advance because you were thinking, “My goodness, the lawn flamingo. That fellow has to pass on sooner or later. We’re going to be ready”? Or is there some other process through which you learned of his passing, maybe a local paper or a wire?
  FOX: In his case, it was the latter. And I believe it was both a local paper and the wire.
  It is indeed the case that obits for many of these major historical figures — presidents, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, old-time silver screen stars — those are indeed written in advance.
  The selection criterion is: Does this person have a life that — it was so long in the public eye, so rich, so complex, and so deeply documented that we wouldn’t want to get caught short writing his or her obit on deadline? Of course, very often we do because we’re a small department, and things happen.
  COWEN: People die suddenly.
  FOX: Right. Things happen. Rockers OD. Planes go down. Things happen. But in general, we try to have a certain level of preparedness with the major figures. We do indeed have the advance obits — all but the top, as it were — written, edited, on file. We have about 1,700.
  That said, the vast majority of what my colleagues and I down in the trenches do, probably 90 percent of our working life, are daily obits that are found out about, reported, written, edited, copyedited, put in the paper all in the space of a single day, just like any other article in the paper.
  COWEN: Of the thousand Times obituaries over the course of a year, how many of those have some early draft ready to go? Of course, it needs to be modified, but — .
  FOX: There’s no way to predict. Sometimes we can literally have a day where three of our advances drop at once, and the editors get very busy trying to find either the original reporter or, if that person’s unavailable, someone else in the newsroom who can call the family, call the funeral home, get confirmation that, indeed, this person has died. Sometimes you can go for six months without having an advance drop.
  Again, this is all in the hands of fate, and we are only men and women.
  COWEN: But on average, below half, above half, half?
  FOX: I’ve never kept track of it because it’s not quite in my wheelhouse. This is the editor’s headache. I have other headaches. But half of all the ones we have on file, half of all the ones we run — no, a very small percentage, I would say, of those we run in the print paper every year are advances. A number, I couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry.
  COWEN: Now, this is not all true of your work or the Times today, but it used to be a long-standing joke that in the obituaries pages, women and black people never die because there was an emphasis on white males, say, 30, 40 years ago.
  FOX: No. But remember, think about what an obit is. It is not only the most narrative genre in the paper; it is the most retrospective. We are writing about the movers and shakers who made our world. I think of obit writing as the act of looking through a sliding window onto the past, a kind of window that slides back along the rails of time.
  When I first started the job in 2004, we were writing overwhelmingly about the people on either side of World War II. We edged up into the Cold War. We’re now writing about Vietnam and the civil rights era.

  I think of obit writing as the act of looking through a sliding window onto the past, a kind of window that slides back along the rails of time. When I first started the job in 2004, we were writing overwhelmingly about the people on either side of World War II. We edged up into the Cold War. We’re now writing about Vietnam and the civil rights era.

  And no matter how we feel about it in light of modern sensibilities, the stark reality of our world is, pretty much the only people who were allowed to be actors on the world stage in the 1940s, ’50s, were overwhelmingly white men.
  I’m happy to say that in the 12 years I’ve been doing this job, as that window has slid up into the civil rights era and even the women’s movement, that page of ours has started to diversify.
  I had the great privilege, for instance, of writing our page-one obit of Betty Friedan, knowing full well that had it not been for her writing The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and launching the modern women’s movement, I would very likely not be in the newsroom of the New York Times writing a page-one story.
  COWEN: Do you have a sense — which, by the way, I would completely favor — that somehow other people’s notions of history are not diverse enough but that with obituaries, by choosing a wiser selection or a deeper understanding of who is important, to bring a greater balance to our understanding of history by deliberately trying to introduce greater diversity to the selection of who gets covered?
  FOX: Again, I’m the wrong person to ask. Our section editors make those calls. Because we can write about so few people, we are writing by definition about newsworthy people who either made news while they were alive or who quietly did something that made news.
  Again — and I will repeat myself until I’m blue in the face — through no fault of anyone who is active in the world today, those people regrettably were overwhelmingly white men. We are not in the revision business. We can’t revise history, no matter how much it may be painful to look on it with hindsight.
  COWEN: Are there obituaries of economists that stand out in your mind? Or maybe some you’ve written?
  FOX: Well, interestingly, there is one. As I said, my original training was in classical music, so my editors almost jumped out of their skins with excitement when they discovered they could assign me the obituary of a Harvard economist named Richard T. Gill.
  Now, why did they give that to me? Because as we say in the lede of the obit, “Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, died,” etc., etc.
  COWEN: Yes, I remember reading that one. That was before I knew that you were you.
  FOX: I was me then. You just didn’t know it.
  COWEN: Correct.
  FOX: It’s, again, one of these wonderful, unexpected twists for all concerned, no one more so than for Richard T. Gill. He discovered when he was in his forties that he had this really good voice, started taking lessons, and amazingly was good enough to sing at the Met while teaching at Harvard.

  Margalit Fox reads the kind of obituary that was “not possible a generation ago”
  COWEN: Some newspapers don’t seem to run obituaries at all. I think one example would be the Wall Street Journal. What determines the level of interest in a newspaper in obituaries?
  FOX: The Journal does. And again, I can’t speak to that because I’m not in newsroom administration; I’m not a publisher. But of course, you’re an economist. It’s economics.
  I mean, sadly, even many major papers are scaling back or even eliminating their obit departments in this age of retrenchment, in the age of the incredible shrinking news hole, in the age where, heartbreakingly, newspaper are dying. I mean, I fear the last one to turn out the lights will be writing the obit of whatever is the last newspaper standing.
  On finding a person’s story
  COWEN: Do people whose obituaries are being written — those where the draft is written in advance — do they engage in much rent-seeking, trying to sway what the paper will do, how they will be covered? They ask to see a draft. Their publicists elbow people in the obituaries department. They try to manage their reputations. Or does this really not much go on?
  FOX: Occasionally, although of course we would never let them. It is absolutely verboten for anyone to see a draft of his or her obit. The Times is not permitted to comment on or divulge the contents of any forthcoming news story. Of course, if you think about, an advance obit is kind of the ultimate forthcoming news story.
  Famous people, for reasons of ego perhaps, can make an educated guess as to whether we have an obit of them on file, but they’re certainly never going to see it.
  COWEN: But if they say, “Well, would you let me send you my bio?” do you just turn them away, or do you — .
  FOX: No, because it may be useful to us for study purposes. We’re not going to tell them whether we’re going to use it or not.
  And we do get — not for advance obits so much, but for daily obits on deadline where the subject has actually died — if a person has been in public life all of his or her life — and we usually see this for either politicians or particularly Hollywood people — and he or she has had a publicist in life, that publicist will occasionally send us this glossy press kit. I find it quite fascinating that there is this one last act of spin control attempted in death.
  …[I]f a person has been in public life all of his or her life — and we usually see this for either politicians or particularly Hollywood people — and he or she has had a publicist in life, that publicist will occasionally send us this glossy press kit. I find it quite fascinating that there is this one last act of spin control attempted in death.
  COWEN: Every now and then, an especially tragic event happens. Obvious example I guess for New York would be 9/11. My sense is an especially high proportion of well-known people died on 9/11. When there’s a large number of deaths you might be covering all at once, how is that handled?
  FOX: I was not involved with that in any way, nor was the obituary department directly. I would beg to differ with the contention that a large number of high-profile people died on 9/11. They became in a sense high-profile people because of the way they died, but very few of them were famous in conventional terms. That was one of the great heartbreaks. It was these ordinary working men and women, the people who had to be at work at a quarter to eight here in New York.
  The Times of course did this marvelous, very moving series of little capsule obits on almost all of the 3,000 called “Portraits of Grief,” but that was not handled out of obits. A special team was convened in Metro to deal with that. And this was long before I was on the obit desk, in any case.
  COWEN: Two individuals who are clearly obituary worthy, so to speak — one would be Thomas Pynchon, the other J. D. Salinger. Both disappeared from public view for decades on end. So, if one has to write the obituary of those individuals, what is it that one actually does? There are blank decades, or you know things already the rest of the world doesn’t know?
  FOX: Well, again, I’ve not been involved with either, but I can make an educated guess as to what one would do. One would comb the clippings.
  This would be an advance obit where the reporter would be given the comparative luxury of time, which means a week or even two weeks instead of four or five hours, to put something together — combs the clippings, of course makes every attempt to get to this elusive person, which is probably going to be impossible, but you have to try.
  And then you interview around them. You interview their editors. You interview friends. You interview neighbors. You interview old lovers. You interview anyone and hope they haven’t been forbidden to talk or, if they have been, they don’t take it seriously. You assemble the best you can while, of course, explaining to readers, “This famously incommunicative person made sure that his life was obscure. Here’s what we know.” That’s all you can do.
  COWEN: It’s an interesting question. People who knew them and maybe who were told not to talk — do you think there are any privacy issues with obituaries that we should worry about? So, in general, we believe in the public’s right to know, correct?
  FOX: Absolutely.
  COWEN: If there’s a political candidate, a historical event. But when people have passed away, obviously in some key ways they matter much less — and especially people who are not historical figures — but nonetheless, there’s an outline of a life. It may involve drug addiction or alcohol problems, illegitimate children, strange things that happened to them that maybe they want to keep secret.
  Do you think, for a person who’s passed away, there are privacy rights of a sort that we should not tread on?
  FOX: No, we’re not in the veneration business. We’re not eulogists. We will occasionally get families, particularly families who are not conversant in dealing with the press, who say, “Please put in, ‘He died surrounded by his loved ones.’ Please put in, ‘He touched the life of everyone he ever knew.’”
  Apart from the fact that we would never use such hoary Victorian clichés, we know that’s the first thing to go on the cutting room floor. It has no place in a modern news obit.
  A modern news obit is a news article like any other. The particular subtype it is — it’s a profile. Just as a profile of a living person you’d read in a newspaper or a magazine has to be balanced, so too do our portraits. Indeed, you sometimes get families who withhold information on Dad’s earlier marriages, other children.
  And you’ll get children calling you up the day an obit runs, understandably in tears, saying, “How dare you write me out of my father’s story?” The only answer you can give is, “We were never told you existed.” We learn to ask all kinds of preemptive questions to try to forestall omissions like that.
  COWEN: Part of your job must, in a sense, be as a therapist — that you’re handling grieving family members or non-family members, people who have agendas, maybe people jostling over the will or having that in mind. Some occasionally may even be happy, but more often than not, they’re tragically bereaved. All of these individuals you talk with, you have to manage, get them to cooperate. In a sense, you’re a psychologist of sorts.
  FOX: My oldest childhood friend actually has two degrees, one in journalism and one in counseling. And she says the elicitation of information — that process is identical. Where they diverge, of course, is what you do with the information once you have it.
  Indeed, we need to be very careful. We’re calling families at vulnerable times. They’re grieving; they’re exhausted; they’re sleep deprived; they have a million things to do. We need to be very careful that we not, however unwittingly, present ourselves as their friend, their advocate, their grief counselors.
  That said, it behooves us — both journalistically, so they feel comfortable enough to talk to us and be candid, and in purely human terms — to treat them as well as possible within allowable, professional limits.
  On Fox’s attitude towards death
  COWEN: Doing all this, what do you think you have learned about the psychology of death that, say, maybe I wouldn’t know?
  FOX: I don’t think there’s anything I’ve learned that any of us wouldn’t know. What I’ve learned is, death sucks. But I think I pretty much knew that before, and I think you pretty much know that, too.

  What I’ve learned is, death sucks. But I think I pretty much knew that before, and I think you pretty much know that, too.

  COWEN: Worse than maybe you thought 15 years ago, before you were doing this?
  FOX: Actually, no. The reverse, if anything. I’m very often asked, “Oh, you write obits. You’re around death every day. Isn’t that depressing?” I must admit, when I started the job full-time in 2004, I worried about that a little bit going in.
  To my great joy and great relief, I found out right away, it’s almost never depressing. For all of these reasons we’ve discussed, in an obit of perhaps a thousand words, when you’re writing about someone fascinating who did something really interesting, often really wonderful, maybe a sentence or two will be about the death. The other 98 percent of the story is about the life.
  In a strange way, with rare exceptions, writing obits is a kind of very life-affirming thing to do — and also wonderful because my colleagues and I are paid to tell stories. It doesn’t get much better than that.
  COWEN: It’s often said, for instance, that the greatest works in the theater are tragedies — Hamlet, one, King Lear, two examples of many. Maybe we’re attracted to tragedy because in a sense it’s life-affirming, or it’s somehow cathartic. Writing about the deaths of individuals, you feel, gives you a better or maybe healthier perspective on life, in the same way that going to see a tragic work in the theater might.
  FOX: Again, think of what was just said. It’s not tragedy. That’s my point. Writing about — it’s not the case that writing about obits is life-affirming because it’s tragedy. Writing about obits is life-affirming because it’s not tragedy.
  COWEN: There’s a custom in some cultures, often eastern European, that if an individual has a terminal disease, they don’t tell the patient that. The person gets sicker but doesn’t know he or she is going to die. Do you have a view of this?
  FOX: I have never encountered that one.
  COWEN: But do you think it could possibly make sense? Could you imagine, say, that a person might prefer not to know he or she is going to pass away?
  FOX: I would have to be a physician, a psychologist, a philosopher, or a cultural anthropologist to answer that. Again, that’s beyond my ken. I’m not going to take on something that’s beyond my ken. It would be horribly inappropriate.
  COWEN: Is there any way in which you feel writing so much history — put aside the obituaries side of it, but just so much American and international history — has it changed how you think about your own life, what you should do with your time?
  FOX: It does give one a carpe diem sense. Often when I lecture, particularly to young people, they who are so far from death are kind of obsessed with it. They always ask me, “What’s the weirdest cause of death you’ve ever had?” I say, “Well, one of my colleagues had a man who was eaten by a crocodile. And he was a naturalist going down a river; crocodile just leapt up and grabbed him.” It’s a pretty horrific way to go.
  But for me it became kind of a metaphor. You never know, as you go through life, whether or not that crocodile is around the next bend in the river. So you might as well try to live as good a life as you can and enjoy the hell out of life before you get to that crocodile.
  COWEN: Do you ever think of what you’re doing in any kind of theological terms? For instance, I went back — I looked at a very good book by your husband. It’s called Essential Judaism by George Robinson — that’s him?
  It’s a wonderful book. There are two quotations from that book. I’ll read them. One is, “A dying person should not be left alone.” The other is, “Escorting the dead is one of the basic acts.” Not just those who are Jewish, but I think many people, would view this as an appropriate philosophy for thinking about death, dealing with death.
  Do you ever think of what you’re doing as a kind of written version of carrying out some of this — escorting the dead in a literary way, and being with them, and having society process that in a matter which has a dimension which is not just news reporting but tied into views of the sacred and higher values? Or is that totally separate for you?
  FOX: Again, I’m not a columnist, so I am paid to have no opinion. Which means — .
  COWEN: Your personal opinion.
  FOX: Which means I’m paid to have no discernible politics and also no discernible religion. Whether or not I am a religious believer in my private life is not germane. But metaphorically, indeed, there is an aspect of writing obits where one feels one is charged with the rather weighty responsibility of ushering people out.
  Now, these are not always people to whom flights of angels will sing to rest. We are obliged to write news obits not only of the great heroes of history but also the great villains. I wrote the obit of Jim Clark, Sheriff Jim Clark, the great enforcer of segregation in Jim Crow Alabama. It was his billy club that was coming down on demonstrators’ heads as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
  I’ve written obits of Nazi war criminals. So we run the whole gamut. Again, the salient question is, “Did this person make history?” — for good but also for ill. And so, we have to usher those people out, too, and in those cases you don’t have a warm, fuzzy feeling. You feel like you want to go home, take a shower, and have a good, stiff drink afterward. But it’s part of the job. It has to be done right.

  I wrote the obit of Jim Clark, Sheriff Jim Clark, the great enforcer of segregation in Jim Crow Alabama. It was his billy club that was coming down on demonstrators’ heads as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I’ve written obits of Nazi war criminals. So we run the whole gamut. Again, the salient question is, “Did this person make history?” — for good but also for ill. And so, we have to usher those people out, too, and in those cases you don’t have a warm, fuzzy feeling. You feel like you want to go home, take a shower, and have a good, stiff drink afterward.

  On things under- and overrated
  COWEN: Now, there’s a segment of all of these conversations. It’s called underrated/overrated. I mention a name or a thing; I ask you if you think it’s underrated or overrated. You’re free to pass on any of these, but I’ll try just a few.
  The pet rock. Overrated or underrated?
  FOX: Well, I’m coming from a position of extreme bias — .
  COWEN: That’s fine.
  FOX: Because I, again, did the obit of the inventor of the pet rock, a man named Gary Dahl. And it was neither overrated nor underrated. It was a beautiful example of what it was. It was a totemic thing that caught the fancy of this kind of cheesy seventies pop culture. With hindsight, overrated perhaps. Had it not been overrated, we wouldn’t have gotten a story out of it.
  COWEN: Now, you have a background as a cellist, I understand. Pablo Casals. Overrated or underrated?
  FOX: Wonderfully rated. I mean, I think he can never be rated highly enough, but it was he — and this is well documented through his series of televised master classes around the world in the very early sixties — who really caused the instrument’s popularity to soar. Most people had really not conceived of the cello as a solo instrument before; it was just sort of going oompah-pah at the bottom of the orchestra.
  He was rated magnificently, but by the same token, you can never rate him too highly because he was wonderful.
  COWEN: What if I say, “Well, Casals was a bit like Schnabel. He had incredible profundity, but there’s just too much scraping on a lot of his recordings, and in some ways they’re hard to listen to today”? He was path-breaking, but if you were to sit down and put on, say, the Bach cello suites, actually very few people, including cello lovers, would pick Casals, right?

  They’d pick János Starker, they’d pick Heinrich Schiff, or — do you agree or not?
  FOX: It’s true, in light of modern sensibilities, you can certainly hear squeaks and occasional bits of strangeness in Casals’s cello suites. I suspect he was older when he recorded them. He lived to be, of course, almost 100. Recording technology has improved since then, and I think he was on such an exalted plane that he gets a bye. He can be and should be forgiven any of these little transgressions that make him seem mortal.
  COWEN: If you had to pick a favorite cellist — I know it’s hard to do, but do you have a pick?
  FOX: It depends on the genre. I like different cellists for different things. The great, doomed Jacqueline du Pré, of course, was a wonderful cellist. Rostropovich. Starker, whose obit I wrote.
  COWEN: You have a wonderful book called The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, where you study the world before ancient Greece. Fantastic book. It’s a story of how, after cracking the code, we learned a lot of it was actually about accounting, economic themes.
  But I’ll ask you. Homer’s Odyssey. Overrated or underrated?
  FOX: Again, can’t rate it highly enough.
  COWEN: Can’t rate it highly enough. We agree. Adverbs. Overrated or underrated?
  FOX: Overused.
  COWEN: Overused, so they’re overrated, in a sense. Maurice Sendak, the author of famous children’s stories — Where the Wild Things Are — maybe the wild things are the children, right? Overrated or underrated?
  FOX: Again, can’t rate him highly enough. And his legacy will endure. Again, his obit, I had the privilege of doing. The Times put it on page one. When is the Times ever going to put a picture-book author on page one? That’s how magnificent he was and how newsworthy.
  COWEN: Was there something surprising you learned about him doing his obit?
  FOX: I think just what a melancholic he was. Now, that’s far from unusual for creative people, but it was — his personal story was rather painful. He was someone who grew up poor, Jewish, knowing he was gay in this very repressive era. He was a deeply, deeply melancholy man. Of course, it comes through in the work, as well.
  COWEN: Studying all these different lives, from so many walks of life, different countries, to some extent different eras, what in life do you feel is underrated or overrated, say, by your readers?
  Various clichés like, “Oh, I spend too much time in the office, not enough with family” — so many people say that. I don’t actually believe they necessarily really mean it. But what do you feel on that after studying all this history? What in life is underrated?
  FOX: Well, I think list questions are overrated, if you’ll forgive me. What in life is underrated? Silence. Stillness. Reading real books on paper.
  COWEN: Those are all underrated.
  FOX: Having real human contact rather than the social media that’s become, in our atomized, postmodern lives, a substitute for real contact.
  COWEN: How important do you think Dear Abby was for American life?
  FOX: Dear Abby and her twin sister Ann Landers, both of whose obits I had the privilege of doing, were fascinatingly important and remain so, retrospectively, as barometers of the way the country was going to go.
  They were both these very pragmatic women who, while not being firebrands in any sense, were just a little bit left of center because they embodied a kind of progressive mid-century humanism. And so, they were a very, very interesting index of the direction in which progressives were trying to nudge the country in those years.
  On the pleasures of puzzle-solving
  COWEN: You have another book — it’s called Talking Hands. It’s about the sign language which developed in a Bedouin village in Israel, correct?
  FOX: That’s right.
  COWEN: Is that a fair way to describe it?
  FOX: Absolutely.
  COWEN: You have these two books. There’s also an e-book of your obituaries, which you can buy for your Kindle. And then there are the obituaries you write. Do you see any underlying unity to your writings, including your next novel on — it’s a kind of Edwardian crime story. What ties it all together?
  FOX: It’s a nonfiction book. My next book, which is my third after these two, is narrative nonfiction. I’m capable only, it seems, of writing nonfiction. I was born without the fiction-writing gene, alas. What underpins the two of my books that are out, the third book that’s coming, my work at the Times, is narrative. I care passionately about narrative.
  I care passionately about storytelling and the privilege of telling stories, albeit in the nonfiction genre.
  COWEN: Somehow the idea of cracking a code or unraveling a mystery, to me, seems to run throughout all your work. There’s a kind of mystery of a life, which you’re never going to state but maybe very subtly hint at, especially with those first and last sentences. Talking Hands is about figuring out a sign language and how it came to be. Riddle of the Labyrinth is very explicitly about cracking a code.
  So, is that a common theme in your thought? Or solving this Edwardian mystery — I haven’t read that book yet, but — .
  FOX: Yes, I think that’s right. I’m passionately interested in heuristics. When I was a kid, my friends and I — you know, back when kids engaged in real play and didn’t just sit with their palm devices — we used to make little treasure hunts for each other. It’s all about heuristically following clues from A to B to C to get — the goal is not the thing itself. The treasure was just some silly little prize or nothing at all.
  It was just the chance to work through all the clues and see if you were on the right lines. Here, too, unpacking a sign language that’s never been analyzed. In Riddle of the Labyrinth, unraveling this Aegean script that was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900, not solved for 50 years because they not only didn’t know what the tablets said when they were unearthed on Crete, they didn’t know what language they were in. It’s a black box. How do you penetrate that?
  In obits, too, what are the heuristics of a life that allows someone to get from A to B to C to D, all the way to Z when I get them, in his or her life? How much of that is free will, and how much of that is determined by pure, blind fate?
  COWEN: I get that you may not have that much spare time, given all that you do. But if you’re going to read something for fun in your spare time, what’s that likely to be, research aside?
  FOX: Narrative nonfiction. The great contemporary masters — John McPhee, Tracy Kidder — plus the wonderful old masters of essays — E. B. White, Red Smith, Twain of course. Always Twain.
  Twain is completely symptomatic for the people I love to read because you not only get the paramount stylist, the nonpareil of stylists, but you can also see through the writing. It’s a window onto how the man’s mind works. And that, I love.
  On advice for young writers
  COWEN: Final question. I know this is a tough one. Someone comes up to you and says, “I so much admire your work. I would love to write obituaries for a living.” I know there are not many paths into this, but what advice would you give them?
  FOX: I would say, don’t feel you can or should specialize. The child has not been born who comes home from first grade clutching a theme that says, “When I grow up, I want to be an obituary writer.” Be a journalist first. Go to journalism school.
  That’s what I did. When I was 30, I chucked my unfulfilling jobs in book and magazine publishing and went to Columbia journalism school, got a master’s, and have been in newspapers ever since.
  Go to journalism school. Be a journalist. Writing obits — and here we’ve come nicely full circle — writing obits is just one way of doing journalism, a very satisfying narrative way.
  COWEN: Thank you very much, and we all look forward to your next book coming out next summer.
  FOX: Thank you.

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/09/23/the-art-of-the-obituary-an-interview-with-margalit-fox/

  The Art of the Obituary: An Interview with Margalit Fox
  By Alex Ronan September 23, 2014
  At Work

  Photo: Ivan Farkas
  In nearly twenty years and twelve hundred obituaries, Margalit Fox, a senior writer at the New York Times, has chronicled the lives of such personages as the president of Estonia, an underwater cartographer, and the inventor of Stove Top Stuffing. An instrumental figure in pushing the obituary past Victorian-era formal constraints, Fox produces features-style write-ups of her subjects whether they’re ubiquitous public figures, comparatively unknown men and women whose inventions have changed the world, or suicidal poets. (More on those below.)
  I caught up with Fox in the Upper West Side café where she’s written two books, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind and The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, the latter of which was published in paperback earlier this year. She was remarkably jovial and eager to clarify what it’s like to write about the dead every day. We spoke about the history of the obituary, her love of English eccentrics, and how it feels to call a living person in preparation for his or her eventual death.
  Does the work you do change the way you think about death?
  This work does skew your worldview a bit. We all watch old movies with an eye toward who’s getting on in age. I watch the Oscars memorial presentation and sit there going, Did him, did her, didn’t do that one. For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is.
  How did you end up in the obituaries department?
  I’d never planned for a career in obits. The child has not yet been born that comes home from school clutching a composition that says, When I grow up, I want to be an obituary writer. I started as an editor at the Times Book Review. It was wonderful to be around books and people that love books, but the job itself was copyediting. I was afraid that all they’d be able to put on my tombstone was “She Changed Fifty-Thousand Commas into Semicolons.” I started contributing freelance to the obituary section and ended up getting pulled in as a full-time writer.
  How is your section different from other news sections at the paper?
  Ninety-five percent of our job is writing daily obits on deadline. It’s impossible to have an advance written for all the pre-dead who we hope to cover, so we usually have to phone someone up to ask about a person or a subject we don’t know much about. Recently, one of my colleagues was heard running around the office going, Does anyone know anything about exotic chickens?! It’s that sort of thing.
  How do people respond to getting a call from you within hours of the death?
  In all my time doing obits, I’ve had maybe three families who refused to talk to me. In fact, families often reach out to us. If you’re a public figure who’s had a publicist during your working life, your publicist will do this one last act of publicity for you. One is eligible for spin control, even in death.
  When I cold call a family, the minute I say my name and my paper, they’ll usually put the phone aside, turn to a relative and say, I’m on the phone with the New York Times! People tend to be grateful that their loved one is being publicly remembered.
  Is it hard for you to navigate sources that are so regularly in a fragile state?
  It behooves you, in purely human terms, to treat them as kindly as possible. That said, you don’t want to lull them into the sense that you’re a friend, an advocate, or some sort of a grief counselor. You do have people break down crying on the phone and you just wait patiently for them to regain composure.
  In what ways do families try to control the narrative?
  Families will say, Oh, be sure to put in that he died surrounded by his loved ones, or, Make sure you add that she touched the lives of everyone she knew. Those are things I never want to put in because they’re these Victorian clichés, but also because the obituary as a form has moved beyond protecting the family’s narrative.
  How else has the form changed?
  Well, for one thing, they’re a lot more fun to read. They used to be very formulaic.
  Since they were considered boring, editors used to assign journalists obits as punishment. You knew someone was in trouble if they were chasing down obituaries.
  That started to change with the great Alden Whitman, Mr. Bad News. He was famous for his advances. He’d do all this research and sit down with his subjects and they’d give him these very revealing interviews because they knew nothing would come out till they were gone. Douglas Martin, a colleague of mine who has been on obits longer than I have, started writing them in this charming, lively way, which has influenced my own style.
  Our last few obits editors at the Times encouraged, where appropriate, a lighter, more features-style treatment. If you get one of these wonderful characters who took a different route to work one day in 1947 and invented something that changed the world, or one of these marvelous English eccentrics, there’s so much space to play. In the course of an obit, you’re charged with taking your subject from the cradle to the grave, which gives you a natural narrative arc.
  Is there room for humor in today’s obituary?
  I think so. The obits section is quite misunderstood. People have a primal fear of death, but 98 percent of the obit has nothing to do with death, but with life. There are maybe two sentences in there about when or where the guy died and with the rest, you let the person’s life guide the treatment. We like to say it’s the jolliest department in the paper.
  Do you ever fight over covering particular people?
  Only very gently. The thing about obits is there’s always enough to go around.
  How do advance obits work?
  Very often, in terms of advances, you hear that someone is hanging by a thread, you drop everything, you read all these books, do whatever you think you might have time to do, and then they live forever. The first advance I worked on was a big-deal academic, and he’s still around today. I wrote it almost twenty years ago.
  We work on advance obits in the brief lulls between dailies, but it’s impossible to get them all done, so you’re left hoping people will live to be a hundred—otherwise it’s a mad scramble. That happened to me with Betty Friedan. She was among my pile of advance obits, but I hadn’t gotten started when I got a call that she had died. It was a Saturday; I rushed down to the office and frantically turned out 3,500 words. We got it in the next day’s paper. As I was running out of my apartment, I looked in the fridge and all I had was a leftover falafel, which was the only thing I had time to eat as I wrote it. I will forever associate Betty Friedan with cold falafel.
  Can you talk about your use of euphemisms, either in the obituaries or in your dealings with families and close friends of the dead?
  Rarely do I reach out to the subject of an advance obit, but when I do it can be difficult. The great Alden Whitman used to have these euphemisms he’d use, like, This is for possible future use, or, We’re updating your biographical file. I’ve used that successfully a few times. People absorb as much as they can handle.
  The one thing that has changed, in terms of journalistic practice, is the cause of death. It’s much less euphemistically couched than in the past. When I was growing up, newspapers were very Victorian when it came to describing death. If you saw “short illness” it meant heart attack and “long illness” meant cancer. In small town papers where obits are written to protect the families, you still see that, but we’re much more straightforward.
  How was suicide described?
  Into the first half of the twentieth century you’d see, He died by his own hand. We say he committed suicide or he shot himself. We don’t go out of our way to be gruesome, but we’re obliged to report the cause of death even if it’s something stigmatized like AIDS or suicide.
  Is it harder to get a confirmation on a suicide?
  Occasionally, the family will confirm the death but won’t give the cause. One of the most heart-wrenching interviews I’d ever have to do was for a poet. I have maybe one suicide a year and they all seem to be poets. If I were an insurance company, I’d never write a policy for poets. This particular poet had shot himself, which I knew from other sources. But we’ve got to get the cause of death or the confirmation from someone close to the subject because many, many years ago we put an obit in the paper of someone who wasn’t dead. So now we’ve got an ironclad rule that a family member or close source has to confirm the death, usually by way of giving the cause.
  I knew I’d have to call this poet’s wife and ask her to confirm the cause of death. There is nothing in Emily Post on making that call. It’s bizarre and horrific that as a stranger you’re calling someone cold and saying, Hello, you don’t know me, but I’m going to ask about the most painful thing in your life, which just happened yesterday, and I’m going to publish it where millions of people can see it. I called up, I took a deep, silent breath, I introduced myself and then—I’d normally never be this familiar with a source—I said, Honey, what the hell happened? God bless her, she told me. It was New York, in the summer, they had a bedroom air conditioner that was very noisy and, as his last act of tenderness to her, he made sure it was on, knowing the noise of the AC would cover the sound of the shot.
  Is there an emotional toll for you in writing up those kinds of stories?
  Suicides, particularly young suicides, are very, very painful. You can’t not be affected by having a story on your desk about someone in their twenties or thirties who has just shot himself. Very rarely is there an emotional toll, maybe once or twice a year. Happily, the vast majority of people we write about are people who’ve died in their beds in their eighties, having lived long, fruitful lives.
  What happened with the obituary that was published before the person had died?
  It was the obit of an elderly Russian dancer. One of our dance writers read in the European papers that she’d died. It was a Friday night, he couldn’t reach anyone in Europe, so he wrote that her death was reported by whatever paper he sourced the announcement from and the obit ran the next morning. We got furious calls from her family. Not only was she not dead, she was living in a nursing home in Manhattan.
  Alex Ronan is a writer and abortion doula based in New York. She’s written for nymag.com, Adult, and Wag’s Revue.

• All Things Considered, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2013/06/30/196233019/how-one-woman-nearly-deciphered-a-mysterious-script

  Author Interviews
  < How One Woman Nearly Deciphered A Mysterious Script June 30, 20134:05 PM ET Listen· 7:13 7:13 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JACKI LYDEN, HOST: It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Critics have called Margalit Fox's new book "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" a paleographic detective procedural. The book follows the story of one of the most fascinating efforts of all time to crack a mysterious script, literally unearthed in Crete, known as Linear B, a rather clinical name for an elegant, alluring set of characters. No one knew how Linear B sounded or what it was, but it dated back to 1450 B.C., the days in which Homer sets the "Odyssey." Margalit Fox is good at bringing the departed to life. She's a writer for The New York Times who has a cult following for her fascinating obituaries. She's also a linguist herself. In "Riddle of the Labyrinth," she centers on one of the three people who rescued Linear B from oblivion: Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College who died in 1950. Margalit Fox, welcome to the program. MARGALIT FOX: Thank you so much, Jacki. LYDEN: It's just a fascinating detective tale. And just to give people a picture of these pictographs which are being unearthed, there are little spears, little horses' heads, arrows, pots. And the discoverer is a British archeologist known as Sir Arthur Evans. He's quite a Victorian figure. FOX: Indeed. Arthur Evans was a Victorian man, writ large or, rather, writ small. He was barely five feet tall. He was obscenely wealthy. So when he knew he wanted to excavate at Knossos, he simply bought up the property and bought himself this extraordinary buried Bronze Age palace. LYDEN: Now, for the next 50 years, Evans doesn't make any real measurable progress. Why was the code so hard to crack? FOX: Well, you have the linguistic equivalent of a locked room mystery. Linear B was an unknown script from the ancient past. It resembled no alphabet known, ancient or modern. To make matters worse, it wrote an unknown language. So not only could no one decipher Linear B for more than half a century, no one even knew what language the strange clay tablets recorded. LYDEN: And credit for cracking the code eventually is going to go to this young English architect named Michael Ventris. But the Sherlock Holmes in your telling is an American professor. Her name is Alice Kober. How did she get obsessed with this language, Linear B, in the first place? FOX: Alice Kober was an overworked underpaid professor of classics at Brooklyn College here in New York. When she was an undergraduate at Hunter College in Manhattan, she took a course on Early Greek Life, and it seems to have been there that she encountered the first glimpse of Linear B. And undeciphered scripts exert a powerful hold on people. And Alice Kober, already confident of her own blazing intellect on her graduation from Hunter College, announced confidently to anyone who would listen that she would one day solve the riddle of the script, and she came very close before she died. LYDEN: You've got a special relationship with Kober. You were the very first person to have access to her papers at the University of Texas, and these are note cards that she uses to make sense of these language elements. Could you describe a little bit of her personality and these note cards? FOX: Night after night, after her classes at Brooklyn College were taught, Kober, who never married and lived in Flatbush with her widowed mother, would sit at her dining table, cigarette burning at her elbow and sift the hundreds of words and symbols in these strange Cretan inscriptions. When she started in the 1930s, she kept her statistics in a series of notebooks. But during World War II and four years afterwards, paper was a very scarce commodity in this country. Undaunted, she cut out, by hand, the equivalent of index cards from any spare paper she could find: examination blue book covers, the backs of old greeting cards, and, it must be said, an awful lot of checkout slips that she discretely pinched from the Brooklyn College library. Over time, until her death in 1950, she hand-cut and annotated 180,000 of these cards. LYDEN: It's just absolutely astonishing to think about. And she hands Michael Ventris, who eventually cracks the code, a key. What is the key? FOX: Alice Kober's great discovery made simply by this relentless analysis, she discovered that the language of Linear B, whatever it might have been, was an inflected language. In other words, that it relied on word endings just as Latin or Spanish or German does to give its sentences grammar. LYDEN: So she meets Michael Ventris, and then she goes home and basically passes away. It's very sad. Did Ventris ever give her credit for cracking the code just a couple of years later? FOX: Yeah. Alice Kober died almost certainly of some type of cancer at the age of only 43 in 1950, just two years before Ventris cracked the code with the method she developed. And, yeah, she de facto handed him the key through her published papers which were, in effect, a forensic playbook for here's how you decipher an unknown ancient script writing an unknown ancient language. Ventris, in my opinion and in the opinion of historians of the decipherment, did not give her due credit. Just before his untimely death in 1956, he did give a talk in which he acknowledged her work. But, as we say in the book, it really was too little too late. LYDEN: Mm-hmm. You know, this is truly a story of passion. All three of the individuals who are the tent poles of your story - Evans, Kober and Ventris - are consumed by it, and what you also conclude with is the absolute passion of the knowledge that we may not know how this sounds or what it said, but someone spoke this once, and they want to unlock that. FOX: That's right. That is the lure, truly, of an undeciphered script from the past. Not only that the modern decipherer, looking at these weird symbols, cannot read it. That's exciting enough, but also this compelling awareness that once, long ago, someone could read it. It makes you want to read it again. LYDEN: Margalit Fox is an obituary writer for The New York Times. Her book is called "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code." Margalit Fox, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you. FOX: Thank you, Jacki. My pleasure.

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

Don Crinklaw
Booklist. 114.18 (May 15, 2018): p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer.
By Margalit Fox.
June 2018. 384p. Random, $27 (9780399589454). 823.8.
Oscar Slater was a pimp, a gangster, and a friend to scum, but he didn't deserve what happened to him. He was accused of a 1908 Glasgow murder he didn't commit--based on evidence that didn't prove anything, identified by eyewitnesses who were manipulated by the police--and spent nearly 20 years in a hellhole of a Scottish prison. Slater secured his place in history when the whole sordid matter came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes applied the Great Detective's methods, and, in time, Slater was freed. Fox does a marvelous job following Doyle's piecing together of the case, noting that the methods of the detective were rooted in Doyle's medical background. Like Holmes, Doyle is, in effect, diagnosing a crime scene, only this time in real life. Each cigarette butt is aching to tell its story; learn to listen. Fox also links the new century's fascination with the evolving philosophy of empiricism, which, like Holmes, stressed that absorbing the evidence of the senses is the first step in answering the question, "What happened?" A compelling true-crime account. --Don Crinklaw
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crinklaw, Don. "Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 9. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=69954dcf. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400736

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

John Hogan
British Heritage Travel. 39.3 (May-June 2018): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kliger Heritage Group, LLC
https://britishheritage.com/
Full Text:
Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox (Random House)
After wealthy spinster Marion Gilchrist was murdered in her well-appointed Glasgow home in 1908, a startled public clamored for justice. Unfortunately for Oscar Slater, the police settled on him, in spite of the evidence. But the man's luck drastically changed when the writer of the Sherlock novels set out to prove his innocence. Slater, a fan, smuggled a note out of prison to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle asking for help and the game was afoot!
New York Times reporter Fox deftly deconstructs this case with page-turning reportage and a studious analysis of the setting--notably the anti-Semitism that helped lead to the false conviction. Conan Doyle is presented in all his intellectual glory, almost as impressive as his world-famous character. Holmesians will appreciate reading about both the development of forensic science and their favorite author as a real-life person managing life-and-death stakes.--John Hogan

Conan Doyle for the Defense goes on sale June 26.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hogan, John. "Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer." British Heritage Travel, May-June 2018, p. 62. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537591395/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=60cb29ff. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A537591395

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer
Margalit Fox. Random House, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-399-58945-4

New York Times senior writer Fox (The Riddle of the Labyrinth) brings to life a forgotten cause celebre-in this page-turning account of how mystery-writer-turned-real life sleuth Arthur Conan Doyle helped exonerate a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder. In 1908, Marion Gilchrist was found bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow home. Early into the investigation, the police centered their suspicions on Oscar Slater, a German Jew expat and known gambler, who was eventually convicted of the murder based on such shoddy evidence as the fact that he'd pawned a brooch similar to one owned by Gilchrist that was missing from the scene of the crime. When Slater's attorneys reached out to Conan Doyle after the trial, the author investigated the case using the method of rational inquiry that was inspired by his medical training and was the hallmark of his famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. Through "Holmesian acumen and Watsonian lucidity, [Conan Doyle] dismantles the Slater case plank by plank," Fox writes, starting with the brooch, which he deemed inconsequential: first, because it was not a match for the missing one, and, secondly, because it had been pawned by Slater before Gilchrist's death. Taking a cue from Conan Doyle, Fox then uses the brooch to show how Slater was likely framed for the crime, and how both class bias and anti-Semitism influenced the rush to convict him. The author's exhaustive research and balanced analysis make this a definitive account, with pertinent repercussions for our times. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 84. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532760/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=60004732. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532760

With just a little more time ...

Susanna J. Sturgis
The Women's Review of Books. 31.1 (January-February 2014): p10+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
By Margalit Fox
New York: HarperCollins, 2013, 363 pp., $27.99, hardcover
How can something once so well-known become so lost? Margalit Fox's engrossing The Riddle of the Labyrinth asks the question twice: once about the writing on tablets unearthed in Knossos, Crete, in the first years of the twentieth century; and again about the crucial contribution of Alice Elizabeth Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, to their eventual decipherment decades later. Kober published her key papers on Linear B, as the script on the tablets was called, in the mid-to-late 1940s. Within a very few years her work had disappeared almost completely from the record.
This won't surprise any student of women's history--but The Riddle of the Labyrinth reminds us of how quickly languages and even whole civilizations can vanish from sight. The scribes of Knossos wrote in Linear B around 1450 BCE. The script could still be read and written 250 years later, around 1200 BCE, but by the time of Homer, around 800 BCE, not only Linear B but writing in general was unknown. Homer's epics were originally sung or told, not written down. By Homer's time, Minoan Crete was as mythical as the Olympian gods, and by the time Plato (427-347 BCE) walked the streets of Athens, Homer was somewhat legendary himself.
When the British archaeologist Arthur Evans found the tablets in the ruined palace at Knossos, history was turned on its head. As Margalit Fox writes: "Nineteenth-century scholars dismissed Homer's accounts of Bronze Age life as pure poetic fancy. The glories of Classical Greece, the strong implication went, had sprung full blown from the long cultural vacuum that preceded them." Thanks to his father, a dedicated amateur geologist and archaeologist, Evans had grown up around tangible evidence that history didn't work like that. Now he had proof that a previously unknown civilization had preceded Classical Greece by a thousand years--and evidence that writing had existed in Europe many centuries before scholars thought it had.
But now what? Evans called the script of the tablets Linear B, not because it was written on a line, though it was, but because it was written with linear strokes, as opposed to, say, cuneiform, whose strokes are wedge-shaped. For would-be decipherers, it posed the most daunting challenge of all: an unknown language written in an unknown script. No Rosetta Stone appeared, pairing the unknown script and unknown language with a known language in a known script. Linear B came with only two clues: a place, Crete; and an approximate time, the middle of the fifteenth century BCE.
The riddle of Linear B fascinated scholars and amateurs alike, but more than fifty years elapsed before it was solved. The Riddle of the Labyrinth comprises three parts, one for each of the three individuals most crucial to the decipherment: Arthur Evans himself, "The Digger"; Alice Kober, "The Detective"; and Michael Ventris, "The Architect," who finally cracked the code. Evans and Ventris were acclaimed for their work and are remembered today. Kober is not, although, Fox argues persuasively, "without Kober's work, Linear B would never have been unraveled as soon as it was, if ever."
Fox, who trained as a linguist and clearly would have made a wonderful teacher if she hadn't become a journalist, does a masterful job of introducing the nonlinguistically trained reader to the categories and concepts essential to decipherment. She walks us through Kober's analysis step by step until we grasp just how crucial her contribution was. She indeed laid the foundation on which Michael Ventris stood.
Evans, through careful observation, persistence, and deep knowledge of the ancient Aegean, had determined that Knossos was the place to dig. He financed the excavation out of his own deep pockets. Of course he wanted to decipher the inscriptions himself, but his efforts were hampered both by his unsystematic methods and by his romantic assumption that the Bronze Age Cretans--Minoans, as Evans thought of them--were "superior to [the mainland Greeks] in every conceivable way," and thus that the language of Linear B could have nothing to do with Greek. By force of personality and his position as keeper (curator) of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, Evans was a powerhouse in early-twentieth-century archaeology. "The few scholars who dared to question him met with swift and certain professional punishment, and for the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of Minoan supremacy was almost universally accepted," explains Fox. Evans controlled access to the inscriptions, which hindered others' efforts to crack the code. And unlike Kober and Ventris, he lived a very long life, dying in 1941, at the age of ninety.
Kober and Evans, though linked by their devotion to Linear B, could not have been more different. The "upstart American daughter of working-class immigrants," as Fox describes her, Kober supported herself as a professor of classics at Brooklyn College. Her course load was heavy, her academic obligations considerable, and her pay poor. She worked on the inscriptions in whatever spare time she had. As far as Fox can determine from her private papers, Kober never had a romantic partner or even any social life to speak of. Those papers weren't made publicly available until recently, and thus she has been too easily pigeon-holed, and dismissed, as a stereotypical spinster schoolteacher.
But Kober had the scholarly discipline and integrity that others working on Linear B lacked. Like Evans, they all had their pet theories about how the script worked, what language it wrote, and what sound each character represented. (It was recognized early on that Linear B is primarily a syllabary, in which most symbols represent a consonant and a vowel. It also includes dozens of logograms, signs that stand for particular objects.) Their assumptions led them astray. "To Kober," Fox writes,

assigning sound-values at the outset was the
refuge of the careless, the amateurish, and the
downright deluded. By contrast, she treated
the symbols of Linear B as objects of pure
form, looking for patterns that might lead
her, all by themselves, into the structure of
the Minoan tongue.... [Linear B investigators]
were forced to inhabit, as Kober evocatively
wrote, a world of 'form without meaning.' Of
all the would-be decipherers, she was the one
most willing to dwell there for as long as it
took.
While Evans sat on the inscriptions, Kober "systematically acquire[d] every needed weapon in the decipherer's arsenal. She learned a spate of ancient languages and scripts.... She studied archaeology, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics." This preparation took more than a decade. Once enough inscriptions were available to study, about 200, the real work began: creating an analog database of Linear B that recorded how each symbol appeared in relation to other symbols, where it occurred in a word, and much more. Kober filled forty notebooks before World War II paper shortages made notebooks unavailable. Then "she began hand-cutting two-by-three-inch 'index cards' from any spare paper she could find: church circulars, the backs of greeting cards, examination-book covers, checkout slips from the college library, and whatever else she could lay her hands on," writes Fox. Eventually she produced 180,000 index cards, which she filed in cigarette cartons.
Fox writes, "What [Evans, Kober, and Ventris] shared was a ferocious intelligence, a nearly photographic memory for the strange Cretan symbols, and a single-mindedness of purpose that could barely be distinguished from obsession." What Kober lacked, which the men had in abundance, was time. Research positions were scarce for women in those days. Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946-1947, Kober was able to take a sabbatical from teaching and devote herself to Linear B full-time for a year. During that year, she spent six weeks at Oxford copying inscriptions, which were now in the charge of Sir John Linton Myres, Evans's successor as "the grand old man of Aegean prehistory" and, unfortunately, the person charged with preparing four decades' worth of Evans's unruly notes for publication. The inscriptions had to be copied by hand: office photocopiers hadn't been invented. As Fox notes, "[T]he techniques available to scholars in the mid-twentieth century had not advanced much beyond those employed by the Cretan scribes three thousand years before."
From this point on, one setback after another further constricted the already limited time Kober had available for her work: the nonrenewal of her fellowship; the unexpected death of John Franklin Daniel, a respected colleague on whom her future plans had depended; and Myres's liberal use of her secretarial services in preparing Evans's volume for publication. Here Kober was in a bind: the task ate up much of her precious free time, but Myres's transcriptions were often inaccurate and his understanding of Linear B inadequate. Kober couldn't bear the thought of the book going to press with preventable errors. And Evans was still controlling the inscriptions from beyond the grave: no one else could publish them until his Scripta Minoa II came out. Thus she had a strong incentive for hastening the process however she could.
Readers of Riddle of the Labyrinth, knowing what Alice Kober did not--that she was going to die in May 1950, at the age of 43--may be justifiably tempted to rail at fate for being so cruel.
So it was Michael Ventris, not Alice Kober, who finally deciphered Linear B, two years and two months after Kober's death. From Fox's account, he seems to have been the best suited by training and temperament to build on Kober's sturdy foundation. In addition, he had resources that Kober did not: access to additional Linear B inscriptions that had been found on the Greek mainland, and, perhaps most important, time, bought by his success in the stock market. Until now, writes Fox, "the process by which Ventris cracked the code has remained something of a black box all these years." By documenting Kober's work, Fox has illuminated the inside of that box.
Fox poses the inevitable, unanswerable question: Could Alice Kober have made the breakthrough had she lived a little longer?

If her teaching load had not been so great, if
her Guggenheim Fellowship had been
renewed, if she had been hired at Penn after
all, if Myres had not saddled her with a
crushing secretarial load, if her champion
John Franklin Daniel had lived--if she had
lived--it is entirely possible that Alice Kober
would have solved the riddle of Linear B....
She was clearly poised to make headway, if
only she had been given time.... Her deep
intellect, her single-minded resolve, and her
ferocious rationalism made it possible to
recapture the vanished key to the script, the
earliest Greek writing of all.
As a freelance editor, Susanna J. Sturgis thinks that translating English into English is quite challenging enough. She keeps a blog about year-round Martha's Vineyard at http://squattersspeakeasy.com and is the author of the novel The Mud of the Place (2008).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sturgis, Susanna J. "With just a little more time ..." The Women's Review of Books, Jan.-Feb. 2014, p. 10+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A365688835/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0bfc9938. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A365688835

Fox, Margalit. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest To Crack an Ancient Code

Edward K. Werner
Library Journal. 138.10 (June 1, 2013): p120+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Fox, Margalit. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest To Crack an Ancient Code. Ecco: HarperCollins. 2013.400p. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9780062228833. $27.99. ARCHAEOL
Linear B is a script first found on clay tablets excavated on the island of Crete and later at Pylos on the Greek mainland and dating to the Mycenaean period, circa 1400 BCE. The story of its decipherment by Michael Ventris (1922-56) has already been told, e.g., in John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B (1958), and in Andrew Robinson's The Man Who Deciphered Linear B (2002). Now Fox (senior writer, New York Times; Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mi, d), a trained linguist, brings to the fore the groundbreaking work of American classical scholar Alice Kober (1906-50) whose syllabic grids made Ventris's breakthrough possible. Fox starts with the story of "The Digger," Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941), the British archaeologist who excavated the first tablets on Crete and made the first attempts to decode them. The reader then meets Kober, whom Fox dubs "The Detective" for her discovery of the syllabic nature of the script. Kober's work enabled "The Architect" Ventris to identify the texts as archaic Greek. Fox totally engages the reader in the decipherment process and summarizes the content of the tablets: primarily inventory records of people and produce. VERDICT This exciting linguistic adventure, intended for the non-specialist, is recommended to anyone interested in archaeological mysteries--and even to crossword puzzle enthusiasts!--Edward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL
Werner, Edward K.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Werner, Edward K. "Fox, Margalit. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest To Crack an Ancient Code." Library Journal, 1 June 2013, p. 120+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A331168938/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=97c7b422. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A331168938

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

David Pitt
Booklist. 109.16 (Apr. 15, 2013): p7.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.
By Margalit Fox.
May 2013. 384p. Ecco, $27.99 (9780062228833). 480.

Discovered on ancient clay tablets in Crete in 1900 and deciphered half a century later, Linear B is the oldest known dialect of the Greek language, dating from about 1450 BCE. The story of its discovery by British archaeologist Arthur Evans and decipherment by British architect Michael Ventris is often told, but what is less frequently documented is the story of the American woman, Alice Kober, who laid much of the groundwork for the decipherment and who might have cracked the code herself, if she had not died in her early forties. Focusing on Kober's efforts to tease meaning out of the strange, hitherto unknown symbols, Fox tells the story behind the story. Yes, Ventris made some brilliant deductive leaps, but without Kober's years of painstaking work, those leaps could not have happened. You might think a book about trying to decipher a 3,000-year-old language wouldn't be particularly exciting, but in this case you'd be wrong. Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail, biting suspense. We know the code was eventually cracked, but while we're reading the book, we're on the edge of our seats. This one deserves shelf space alongside such classics in the literature of decryption as Simon Singh's The Code Book (1999). --David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2013, p. 7. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A327988319/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=710c5462. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A327988319

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

Publishers Weekly. 260.10 (Mar. 11, 2013): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code Margalit Fox. Ecco, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-222883-3
Linguist and New York Times senior writer Fox spins a fascinating yarn centered around an unlikely heroine: a devoted academic spinster who died before accomplishing her life's mission of cracking an ancient script. In 1900, aristocratic archaeologist Arthur J. Evans put his "tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and myopia" to work in excavating Knossos, where Linear B--the script in question--was discovered on clay tablets in the ruins of a Cretan palace. Architect Michael Ventris eventually completed the decipherment of the language, having built off the work of Alice Kober, the languages professor at the heart of the tale. Working at her kitchen table in the 1940s, hand-cutting over 150,000 cards to systematically catalogue Linear B, Kober and her "passion ... for the life of the mind" historically have been overshadowed by the two more famous men who bookended her endeavors. Fox's deft explanations of the script-solving process--complete with supplemental photos and illustrations of the text--allow readers to share in the mental detective work of cracking the lost language. Ultimately, the revelation here is the enduring nature of writing as an expression of humanity, a message passed not through content, but through the act of interpretation and the passionate endeavor to understand. Photos & illus. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman, Inc. (May 14)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code." Publishers Weekly, 11 Mar. 2013, p. 53. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A322564193/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4fd5523d. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A322564193

Talking Hands

Science News. 172.9 (Sept. 1, 2007): p143.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Science News/Society for Science and the Public
http://www.sciencenews.org
Full Text:
TALKING HANDS MARGALIT FOX
This book takes readers to a living laboratory for the study of language and the ways in which its acquisition reflect the workings of the human brain. Fox focuses on the difference between spoken and nonauditory communication. The research site is the Bedouin community of al-Sayyid in Israel, where the incidence of deafness is unusually high. Residents have developed an indigenous sign language, and everyone in the village "speaks" sign language. Fox, a reporter for the New York Times, traveled to the village with researchers. She reviews the study of language throughout history as well as the history of sign language in the United States and Europe. Sign language is not merely a translation of spoken language, she asserts; it is a distinct mode of communication with its own grammatical rules. Fox explains the differences between spoken and sign language and describes researchers' ongoing attempts to uncover the rules of the al-Sayyid language. Simon & Schuster, 2007, 354 p., b&w plates, $27.00.
----------
Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Talking Hands." Science News, 1 Sept. 2007, p. 143. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A169308640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b423fbcb. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A169308640

Talking Hands

Vanessa Bush
Booklist. 103.22 (Aug. 2007): p17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Talking Hands. By Margalit Fox. Aug. 2007. 337p. Simon & Schuster, $27 (0-74324712-4).419.
New York Times reporter and linguist Fox joined a team of researchers as they traveled to a remote Bedouin village in Israel to record a unique sign language developed over generations. The language, used by deaf and hearing alike, afforded the researchers the ideal conditions for studying a "virgin sign" language, one developed through isolation and heredity, passed down through three generations. Fox recounts the experience of learning and adapting to a new culture--the Bedouin and the signing--as the researchers share meals, lodging, and common experiences with the families they encounter. Fox interweaves the research expedition with the long history of the politics and science behind the study of sign language and human language in general. Drawing on research by linguists, psychologists, and neurologists, Fox reveals the complexity of sign language and the efforts by the deaf to communicate with each other and the hearing. She recalls the contributions of pioneers, including Gallaudet College, Noam Chomsky, and Ursula Bellugi, as well as the Bedouins in their remote village, preserving a beautiful and expressive language.--Vanessa Bush
YA/C: A fascinating supplementary resource for those studying sign language. GE.
YA/C, for books with particular curriculum value
Bush, Vanessa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bush, Vanessa. "Talking Hands." Booklist, Aug. 2007, p. 17. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A172380791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b74d53c7. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A172380791

Fox, Margalit: TALKING HANDS

Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fox, Margalit TALKING HANDS Simon & Schuster (Adult NONFICTION) $27.00 Aug. 21, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7432-4712-2
A New York Times reporter considers the case (and the significance) of a unique sign language that has emerged among the many congenitally deaf denizens of an isolated Bedouin village in northern Israel.
Fox struggled to convince an international team of linguists to allow her even limited access to their research site. (Accordingly, the author has altered many identifying details.) She agreed to numerous limitations on her reporting (she could not, for example, interact with the residents in anything but a casual, polite way), and she was on site for only a short time. But she interviewed the principal researchers on numerous occasions, visited them at conferences and spent years studying the acquisition and development of languages--signed and spoken. (Her long list of scholarly references and her many pages of endnotes testify silently to her assiduity.) The chapters alternate between leisurely, amiable narratives of her visits to the village (where the researchers present slide shows featuring objects and actions and ask the villagers to sign appropriately) and long discursive (and often dense) discussions of the relevant history and scholarship. This approach sometimes gives her text a schizophrenic character. Fox has an appealing voice, and she is best when discussing issues of the most immediate relevance to the village. She describes the people, samples the food, notes the architecture, the customs, the oddities (T-shirts bearing contemporary Western messages). In more academic-minded sections, she discusses the differences between spoken and spatial grammar, revealing a complexity in the latter that will surprise many readers, and summarizes the recent research exploring the differing areas of the brain devoted to spoken and signed language.
A smooth narrative sometimes slowed by academic writing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fox, Margalit: TALKING HANDS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2007. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A169082721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0634d19f. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A169082721

Talking Hands

Publishers Weekly. 254.20 (May 14, 2007): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Talking Hands MARGALIT FOX. Simon & Schuster, $27 (368p) ISBN 978-0-7432-4712-2
The world of sign languages and cognitive research comes to life in this story of a remote Israeli village that's become a test bed for understanding how the human brain processes language. New York Times reporter Fox follows researchers, led by University of Haifa professor Wendy Sandier, to the Bedouin village of Al-Sayyid, where isolation, genetics and inbreeding have led to a higher than usual percentage of deafness in the population. In response, the villagers have created a home-brew sign language used by both the hearing and deaf. By studying this unique language, Sandler and her cohort hope to gain deeper insight into how the brain acquires and uses language. Chapters alternate between the painstaking work in Al-Sayyid and a history of sign language itself. Both are gracefully reinforced with vivid examples, from the early insistence of "experts" that proper sign language must produce words in one-to-one correspondence with spoken language to a lively gathering in Al-Sayyid where conversation flows freely in six languages: English, Hebrew, Arabic, American Sign Language, Israeli Sign Language and the local sign language. Fox takes readers on a fascinating tour of deaf communication, clearly explaining difficult concepts, and effortlessly introducing readers to a silent world where communication is anything but slow and awkward. (Aug. 21)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Talking Hands." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2007, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A163739411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=61bccd37. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A163739411

The British Dreyfus

Jane Ridley
Spectator. 337.9906 (July 7, 2018): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Conan Doyle for the Defence
by Margalit Fox
Profile Books, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 359
One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat. Miss Gilchrist, who lived alone with her maid, was an obsessive collector and hoarder of jewels, which she hid among her clothes. There was no sign of a forced entry, but a valuable diamond brooch was missing. The month before the murder she had changed her will, cutting out her relatives, whom she hated, and leaving everything to her maid.
The Glasgow police decided to arrest a foreigner named Oscar Slater. He happened to have pawned a brooch around the time of the murder. The brooch turned out to belong to Slater himself, but the police persisted in pursuing him, even though he denied having any knowledge of Miss Gilchrist.
The police knew that Slater was innocent, yet they insisted on bringing him to trial. In the High Court at Edinburgh he was convicted, chiefly on the unreliable evidence of an identity parade. Any evidence that contradicted the police case was suppressed. The crucial testimony was a statement from Gilchrist's niece, who had told the police that her aunt's maid had seen the murderer leaving the house and knew exactly who he was. This was not mentioned in court.
Slater did not get a fair trial. He was found guilty, and the judge, who was both biased and incompetent, condemned him to death. Forty-eight hours before he was due to be executed, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and hard labour. He spent 18 years in a grim prison in Peterhead, breaking up granite blocks.
Margalit Fox has chosen a cracking story and, as her account makes clear, Oscar Slater was framed. He was a German Jew, a rascal and part-time pimp, and these facts in themselves were enough to damn him in the eyes of the Glasgow police. The case became notorious as the 'British Dreyfus'. It had all the ingredients: institutional anti-Semitism, corrupt police, a rotten judicial system and an establishment cover up.
Arthur Conan Doyle took up Slater's cause, applying the methods of Sherlock Holmes to solve the crime. He had form in this regard, having previously exonerated George Edalji, the Anglo-Indian lawyer wrongly convicted of mutilating animals.
Conan Doyle learnt how to crack crimes as a medical student at Edinburgh University, where his teacher, Dr Joseph Bell, astonished his students with his wizardry in diagnosis. In his Sherlock Holmes stories Conan Doyle perfected these techniques; and as a real-life investigator he showed that they worked.
In 1912 he wrote a book proving Slater's innocence. He demonstrated that the old lady was killed by someone who knew her (surprise, surprise). The killer probably let himself into the flat using duplicate keys. Though one brooch was taken, the murderer wasn't interested in stealing jewels, but broke open a wooden box containing papers, including her will.
In spite of Conan Doyle's intervention, the authorities refused to reopen the case. A secret inquiry in 1914 was sabotaged by the police, and the officer who pressed for it was dismissed from the force. Not until 1927, after Slater had at last been released, and after key witnesses had recanted in newspaper interviews, did the case go to appeal. Slater's name was cleared.
But solving crimes is not just a matter of brilliant detective work. As Fox points out, the thing about the Slater case is that the police probably knew who did it all along, but they suppressed the evidence. They certainly knew that Slater wasn't the murderer. Proving his innocence was only half the battle; the real problem was how to break the cover up.
Who was it that the police connived with Gilchrist's family to protect? The probable culprit was Gilchrist's step-nephew, Francis Charteris. He had a motive: his aunt had cut him out of her will. Conan Doyle certainly believed he was the murderer. But Charteris was a distinguished Edinburgh doctor and a respectable man. The one person who probably did know the killer's identity was Gilchrist's maid, but she took her secret to the grave.
Fox is not primarily concerned with solving the crime; she is more interested in Conan Doyle and his methods of detection. But her attempt to combine a fast-paced murder mystery with a study of Conan Doyle is sometimes strained and makes for an uneven read.
Caption: Oscar Slater in 1908. Though the police knew he was innocent, they insisted on bringing him to trial THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ridley, Jane. "The British Dreyfus." Spectator, 7 July 2018, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547267116/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62ed2820. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A547267116

Watching the detectives; Crime and prejudice

The Economist. 428.9099 (July 7, 2018): p70(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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TOWARDS the end of the 19th century a patient appeared before a doctor and his students in a Scottish hospital. The doctor, Joseph Bell, eyes bright above a hawk nose, addressed him. "You came from Liberton," he said. "You drive two horses, one grey, one bay; you are probably employed by a brewery." To the awe of his students, the sharp-eyed doctor was right on all counts.
The sharp-eyed reader will have guessed the identity of one of his acolytes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is well known that Conan Doyle borrowed Bell's deductive genius (and his profile) for his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Less well known is that Conan Doyle also used Bell's methods to solve real-life crimes. One such crime--a murder--is the subject of Margalit Fox's new book, "Conan Doyle for the Defence".
Conan Doyle had involved himself in miscarriages of justice before, but this one would eclipse them all. It was so corrupt that it "savoured rather of Russian than of Scottish jurisprudence"; so anti-Semitic that its wrongly accused victim became known as a "Scottish Dreyfus"; so embarrassing to national pride that British writers resorted to not one but two international analogies to convey their disgust.
The inquiry should have been simple. On December 21st 1908 Marion Gilchrist, a wealthy spinster, was bludgeoned to death with a blunt instrument. Shortly afterwards the Scottish police "solved" the case when they arrested Oscar Slater, a local German Jew. Slater was found guilty and sentenced to hard labour in His Majesty's Prison Peterhead.
There he might have remained, had his plight not been brought to Conan Doyle's attention, via a method itself redolent of Victorian melodrama. A pleading note was carried out of Peterhead, hidden in the dentures of a discharged prisoner. Conan Doyle, a Victorian dynamo with a walrus moustache and a passion for cricket and fair play, felt duty-bound to investigate. He set to work, trawling through page after page of evidence. He was horrified by what he found.
It is a capital offence, Holmes declared to Watson, to theorise in advance of the facts. Like Bell, Holmes drew conclusions from evidence as minute as bloodstains, mud on shoes and the precise sort of ash found at a crime scene--scientific techniques that, largely thanks to Holmes himself, would eventually become standard practice in police departments across the world. As Conan Doyle examined the Slater affair, he realised the Scottish police had theorised not merely in advance of the facts but in advance of the crime.
The bobbies in Glasgow had been watching Slater for months. He was no angel but, Ms Fox argues, he had aroused suspicions mostly because he was foreign. Not merely foreign, but German, Jewish, a gambler and (perhaps most horrifying of all) debonair. The police were immediately on their guard.
The deepest stains identified in the Slater case by Conan Doyle were not of blood, but the darker tones of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. If this was a Scottish Dreyfus, then Conan Doyle was its Zola and he cried "J'Accuse…!" with all the might that his position allowed. On November 14th 1927 Slater was released. The case was over. But the prejudices it exposed lived on.
Slater never returned to his family in Germany. That, says Ms Fox, was probably "just as well". A few years later the Nazis took power and his two sisters were murdered at Theresienstadt and Treblinka.
Conan Doyle for the Defence.
By Margalit Fox.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Watching the detectives; Crime and prejudice." The Economist, 7 July 2018, p. 70(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545475411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=33f3a2dd. Accessed 28 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A545475411

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