Daedalus Falling

About the Book

Written in the form of a memoir, Daedalus Falling is the ´autobiography´ of Daedalus, the ´first maker´ of ancient Greek myth - the first master craftsman, the first inventor of ingenious devices, the first man to create monumental sculpture, the first man to fly, the chief architect to the legendary King Minos of Crete and the builder of the labyrinth in which Minos housed the Minotaur.

“Daedalus Falling is a fascinating and often very moving book. Had I turned pages of it at a bookshop, I would have taken it home to read, and the fascination, the interest, the story itself and how well the author copes with it, hold throughout the work.

“There are many wonderful moments – wonderful in the exact meaning of the word, marvelously conceived and beautiful too. You give the horror and cruelty of those times, as well as the refinement, vigorously and plausibly. All the stuff on the birth of sculpture, the making of a statue, is marvelously done, filled me with pleasure and admiration. To me, the first time anyone did that.

“The book, finished nearly two weeks ago, has left a rich residue, a world I think and feel about. A most original book, then, for which I thank you. It is, as I said, very good, fascinating, moving. It holds one. A real achievement .”

Sybille Bedford (in a personal letter to the author)

Imagining that this mythical ´Leonardo´ was in fact the architect of the Palace of Minos at Knossos, this story is set in the middle of the second millenium B.C., fusing legend and myth with what archeologists know and what they surmise about the pre-historic Mediterranean world.

About the Author

Robert M. Hertzberg was born in New York City in 1922 and died in 2000.. He graduated from Olivet College, Michigan in 1943. Following World War II, he was a film writer-editor for Twentieth Century-Fox Films and later a free-lance writer-producer of documentary films. After Daedalus Falling, he wrote The Raft of the Medusa, a novel based on the life and work of the 19th-century Romantic French painter Théodore éricault, published in 2002.. Both books reveal the extent and enthusiasm of the author’s intensive research in two exciting but vastly contrasting societies, 19th-century France and the legendary world of pre-Classical Greece.