Bücher von Margalit Fox

The Riddle of the Labyrinth is the true story of the quest to solve one of the most mesmerizing linguistic riddles in history and of the three brilliant, obsessed, and ultimately doomed investigators whose combined work would eventually crack the code. An award–winning journalist trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox not only takes readers step-by-step through the forensic process involved in cracking an ancient secret code, she restores one of the primary investigators, Alice Kober, to her rightful place in what is one of the most remarkable intellectual detective stories of all time.

';A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man behind Sherlock Holmes . . . Like all the best historical true crime books, it's about so much more than crime.'Tana French, author ofIn the WoodsA sensational Edwardian murder. A scandalous wrongful conviction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the rescuea true story. After a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908, the police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater, an immigrant Jewish cardsharp. Though he was known to be innocent, Slater was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor. Outraged by this injustice, Arthur Conan Doyle, already world renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the methods of his most famous character to reinvestigate the case, ultimately winning Slater's freedom.With ';an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research' (TheWall Street Journal), Margalit Fox immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in its history, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.Praise forConan Doyle for the Defense';Artful and compelling . . . [Fox's] narrative momentum never flags. . . .Conan Doyle for the Defensewill captivate almost any reader while being pure catnip for the devotee of true-crime writing.'The Washington Post';Developed with brio . . . [Fox] is excellent in linking the 19th-century creation of policing and detection with the development of both detective fiction and the science of forensicsballistics, fingerprints, toxicology and serologyas well as the quasi science of ';criminal anthropology.''The New York Times Book Review';[Fox] has an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research.'The Wall Street Journal';Gripping . . . The book works on two levels, much like a good Holmes case. First, it isa fluid story of a crime. . . . Second, and more pertinently, it isa deeper story of how prejudice against a class of people, the covering up of sloppy police work and a poisonous political atmosphere can doom an innocent. We should all heed Holmes's salutary lesson: rationally follow the facts to find the truth.'Time

Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now. A New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In Talking Hands, she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language. Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man''s inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as Talking Hands grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered. Talking Hands offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind. Written in lyrical, accessible prose, Talking Hands will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places.