[issybird]

Originally Posted by gmw

On a technical level, my Kobo makes the symbol font and images far too small to be useful on the e-reader screen ... but since I'm not actually trying to solve the puzzle I'm just ignoring that problem, and taking a look at the symbols occasionally on my computer screen.

I think it would have bothered me more if the symbols had resembled anything I know. Cracking a code in English, to give the obvious example, I'd want to see the letters as that would aid in my understanding. But the symbols in Linear B were only ever going to be so much gobbledygook to me, so it didn't matter. I wonder how long it would take the average person to get to the point where the Linear B symbols were as ingrained and understandable as ABC?

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Is anyone else surprised to find that we don't know what killed Alice Kober? We knew she died early but what happened was never stated early, it became distracting to me as her illness went on that we didn't know what it was. I really wish that "we don't know" was stated early on rather than leaving it open and letting us wonder. I kept expecting an answer only to find that there isn't one.

With all the references to Kober's smoking and the cigarette boxes, I was confident Fox was foreshadowing and not at all subtly that she died from lung cancer. And then, not only do we not know, it seemed to me that the first manifestation of her illness was cognitive difficulties, so I wondered if it were related to smoking at all. Could have been - a metastatic tumor in her brain, say - but that's not at all conclusive. So I wish Fox had foregone the heavy-handed references; it would have been just as effective and not nearly so clunky to say that no cause of death was given, but Kober was a heavy smoker. I have to assume, given the times, so were a lot of the other people involved.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Me too. Somewhere before I read the book I saw it compared to Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel which set my expectations higher, but I don’t think it was quite up to their level.

I think the biggest problem with this is that Fox was constrained by the paucity of material. New resources not previously used, yay! But not enough to make a full treatment from, so boo! I agree with everyone upthread that she was far too much of a Kober apologist. It would have been better if she had let Kober's reputation stand on what she did do, not on what she might have done.

That said, I think she did as good a job as possible in making difficult concepts accessible, understandable and interesting. And what a relief to read a current popular history book that does not create conversations, sidelong glances, gestures and so forth. They seem to be thin on the ground these days.