New Leaf Vote for June 2019 • Into the Labyrinth: The Quest

[issybird]

Let's select the book we'll read and discuss in June 2019!

We love new participants. We're happy for you to vote, but we'd like to request that you not vote unless you plan to join the discussion whatever the selection, in the interest of a vibrant conversation. So if you haven't posted in a book club thread yet, do please say a quick hello here or in the Welcome thread.

This is a poll. Vote for as many books as you'd like. Questions? FAQs | Guidelines Or just ask!

Choices:

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox.
Amazon US $14.49 | Kobo US $14.49 | Kobo CA $11.99 | Kobo AU $9.67 | Kobo UK £4.79

Spoiler:

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.

When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece’s Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe’s earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery.

Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean—the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen—to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the deipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

385 pp.

Around The World In Eighty Days by Michael Palin
Kobo: $6 US; $6 CA; £6 UK; $17 NZ; $14 AU
Kindle: $5 US; $6 CA; £6UK; $5 NZ; $15 AU

Spoiler:

Following the route taken by Phileas Fogg 115 years earlier, Michael Palin set out from the Reform Club to circumnavigate the world. The rules were simple, but nothing else about the trip was straightforward...

From a tour of Venice on a rubbish barge to ship spotting at the Suez Canal and the bicycle rush hour and snake snacks in China, this is an unparalleled tribute to man's ability to make life difficult for himself.

217 pp.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Amazon US $7.99 | Amazon CA $9.99 | Amazon UK £5.49 | Amazon AU $12.99

Spoiler:

Originally Posted by Amazon

God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail.

The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas.

With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey.

An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.

320 pp.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
Amazon US $13.99 | Kobo US $13.99 | Amazon CA $10.99 |Kobo CA $13.99 | Kobo UK £5.49 | Kobo AU $14.99 | OverDrive

Spoiler:

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty.

352 pp.

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Public domain

Spoiler:

It's London, 1907. Journalist Edward Malone, rejected by the woman he loves because he is too prosaic, decides to go in search of adventure and fame to prove himself worthy of her. Soon after, he meets Professor George Challenger, a scientist who claims to have discovered a 'lost world' populated by pterodactyls and other prehistoric monsters.

272 pp.

Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen by Simon Read (Subtitle AKA: Hunting the Great Escape Murderers)
Amazon US, $12.99 | Kobo US $12.99 | Kobo CA $13.99 | Kobo AU $8.99 | Kobo NZ $9.99 | Kobo UK £3.99

Spoiler:

In March and April of 1944, Gestapo gunmen killed fifty POWs—a brutal act in defiance of international law and the Geneva Convention.

This is the true story of the men who hunted them down.

The mass breakout of seventy-six Allied airmen from the infamous Stalag Luft III became one of the greatest tales of World War II, immortalized in the film The Great Escape. But where Hollywood’s depiction fades to black, another incredible story begins . . .

Not long after the escape, fifty of the recaptured airmen were taken to desolate killing fields throughout Germany and shot on the direct orders of Hitler. When the nature of these killings came to light, Churchill’s government swore to pursue justice at any cost. A revolving team of military police, led by squadron leader Francis P. McKenna, was dispatched to Germany seventeen months after the killings to pick up a trail long gone cold.

Amid the chaos of postwar Germany, divided between American, British, French, and Russian occupiers, McKenna and his men brought twenty-one Gestapo killers to justice in a hunt that spanned three years and took them into the darkest realms of Nazi fanaticism.

In Human Game, Simon Read tells this harrowing story as never before. Beginning inside Stalag Luft III and the Nazi High Command, through the grueling three-year manhunt, and into the final close of the case more than two decades later, Read delivers a clear-eyed and meticulously researched account of this often-overlooked saga of hard-won justice.

347 pp.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Amazon US $11.99

Spoiler:

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett & his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925, Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humans. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions inspired Conan Doyle's The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions round the globe, Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilisation--which he dubbed Z--existed. Then his expedition vanished. Fawcett's fate, & the tantalizing clues he left behind about Z, became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness.

For decades scientists & adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett's party & the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes or gone mad. As Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett's quest, & the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle's green hell. His quest for the truth & discoveries about Fawcett's fate & Z form the heart of this complexly enthralling narrative.

352 pp.

[CRussel]

Tough choices for me this month. I don't think there's a single book on the list I dislike the thought of reading, but I forced myself to limit my votes to half+1. Though the internal fight around that +1 was a close call.

[issybird]

A heads up that vote totals have been manually adjusted and the numbers are correct as stand.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Tough choices for me this month. I don't think there's a single book on the list I dislike the thought of reading, but I forced myself to limit my votes to half+1. Though the internal fight around that +1 was a close call.

It's only half +0.5 if that helps.

[issybird]

The Riddle of the Labyrinth it is; it will be only our third nonfiction selection.

[Bookpossum]

Excellent! I'm looking forward to this one as I have a lot of interest in Ancient History.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I’m looking forward to a nonfiction book. It’s available in both ebook and audiobook for Scribd members.

[fantasyfan]

Seems to be a very interesting book. I also look forward to a non-fiction choice. I note that it is on sale in the Kindle UK store, so I won’t have to worry about getting a library copy.

[Catlady]

YouTube has a video of Margalit Fox talking about the book. I haven't watched it.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks for this Catlady - an interesting find.