Finally Finished!

I finally finished David Kahn’s 1,200-page work on cryptography and cryptanalysis: The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet.


Overall, I liked it very much. Always enlightening, almost-always entertaining.

It is very thorough but this is both a large positive and a slight negative. Originally published in 1967, at times it gets bogged down with detailed descriptions of interpersonal relationships between now-little-known WWII-era personalities. It gets VERY bogged down with a (nearly) completely valueless chapter devoted mostly to the construction and staffing of various NSA buildings.

If you liked the detail, science, and writing style of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes you will definitely like this book.

There are a lot of math-light descriptions of many different types of historical codes and ciphers and how they were solved using absolutely flabbergasting strokes of genius or luck or both. I was hoping that something in the book would cause me to come up with new avenues for solving the Khan’s Cons puzzle on puzzlemonster.com, but, unfortunately, nothing really inspirational came out of it. It looks like it’s back to the drawing board for me, yet again.

I tend to jump from book to book, so I managed to knock out two others since I started this one. One is a Bill Amend’s latest FoxTrot compilation (Wrapped-Up FoxTrot) and the other is Terry Pratchett’s most recent Discworld book (Unseen Academicals). I liked the FoxTrot book but I could take or leave the Pratchett one (I am withholding detailed judgment until a couple of friends of mine finish reading their copies).

I have now started on The Gray Man by Mark Greaney. I may have gotten tricked into buying it because one of the reviews described it as “The Bourne Identity for the new millennium”. I saw a couple of the Bourne movies (but did not read the books) and thought they were pretty neat. I am fairly sure I am not going to like this book very much, though, since it seems to follow a pattern of one page of tough guy acting tough, 15 pages describing his gun/helicopter/whatever, rinse, repeat. Obviously I am exaggerating here but you get the point.

We'll see how it goes.