The story of the Rosetta Stone's discovery and decoding. Today, the Rosetta Stone occupies such a prominent role in public interest--not unlike Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids--that its actual significance can easily get lost amid the crowds of tourists clamoring for a view. In his latest book, Dolnick, former chief science writer for the Boston Globe who has written for a wide variety of publications, offers a strong corrective, describing not only how the Rosetta Stone was found, but also how, over several long decades, it was deciphered. He creates an engaging portrait of the two men--Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young--who were mainly responsible for cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs. For centuries, those hieroglyphs had been unreadable. Dolnick provides an exciting narrative of the journey to legibility, and he effectively describes why it was such an important--and excruciating--process. However, the author sometimes goes awry when he strains too hard for wittiness--e.g., describing ancient Alexandria as "Paris to Rome's Podunk." Worse are the banalities that stud Dolnick's analyses. "If you pull the camera back far enough," he writes, "all cultures look the same. People meet and fall in love; they boast and puff themselves up; they mock their rivals; they pray to their god, or a host of gods; they fear death. The details make all the difference." Accessibility is no crime, of course, but the author's desire to make the book accessible to everyone leads him to oversimplify his subject with labored asides: "Imagine how much harder crossword puzzles would be if the answers could be in any language including dead ones." Despite these flaws, Dolnick makes complicated linguistic challenges not only comprehensible, but also especially vivid for readers new to the subject, and, as in his previous books, his enthusiasm is infectious. A largely engaging yet sometimes pedestrian look at language and the limits of what we can understand. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The year 2022 will mark the bicentennial of the modern decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, which unlocked many aspects of that ancient civilization. This new volume by journalist Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World) is an account of the breakthrough. He explains that its key was the 1799 discovery at Rashid (called Rosetta by Europeans) in the Nile Delta of a broken stela, by soldiers from Napoléon's army. The Rosetta Stone, as it has come to be called in the Western world, bears a trilingual text in ancient Greek and Egyptian demotic and hieroglyphic. Copies of the text were made and disseminated among European scholars to attempt to decipher the two Egyptian inscriptions. Dolnick focuses particularly on the intense rivalry between two of those savants: Englishman Thomas Young (1773--1829) and Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (1790--1832). Both compared royal names appearing in the stone's Greek and hieroglyphic texts and discovered that hieroglyphs weren't just ideograms but representations of sounds. For more on Champollion, one might seek out Andrew Robinson's outstanding biography Cracking the Egyptian Code. VERDICT Dolnick presents a fast-paced intellectual adventure for general readers that surveys the invention of writing and the processes of deciphering and decoding. Highly recommended for anyone who relishes challenging puzzles.--Edward K. Werner, formerly at St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., FL

When the Rosetta Stone was discovered by French soldiers in 1799, "the first guesses were that it might take two weeks to decipher," according to this stimulating history of a linguistic puzzle that took 20 years to solve. Journalist Dolnick (The Seeds of Life) reveals that Thomas Young (1773--1829) and Jean-François Champollion (1790--1832), the two "rival geniuses" who "did the most to crack the code," had both been child prodigies and possessed "an uncanny flair for languages," but were "opposites in nearly every other regard." Polymath Young made contributions to the fields of physics, medicine, and linguistics, while Champollion "cared about Egypt and only about Egypt." Though Champollion was the first to truly "read" the language of hieroglyphs, in the 1820s, Young made a key breakthrough in 1816, when he proposed that one grouping on the Rosetta Stone spelled out the name Ptolemy (Champollion insisted that he had come to the same conclusion independently). Dolnick lucidly explains the complex steps taken to decipher the relic, and offers brisk and enlightening history lessons on the first appearances of written language, Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, the Scientific Revolution, and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The result is an immersive and knowledgeable introduction to one of archaeology's greatest breakthroughs. Illus. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Oct.)

For many, the exciting discovery of the Rosetta Stone during the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing race between two great minds to decipher one of the world's oldest written languages remains largely unknown. A brief overview of ancient Egypt and its cultural folklore at the time of the stone's finding sets the stage. The happenstance, mid-war discovery of this all-important artifact is vividly and accurately brought to life. From here, the tale moves on to two geniuses from the world's then-rival superpowers--Thomas Young of England and Jean-Francois Champollion of France--and how they raced to decode the inscribed slab. As these two brilliant minds decipher the Rosetta Stone, so does the reader. The text dives deep into the method of the stone's decoding, as well as ciphers and lost languages at large. Prolific nonfiction author and prior science writer at the Boston Globe, Dolnick's prose is beautifully lyrical, and will engage even those unfamiliar with the three converging subjects of ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone, and Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.