Review by Booklist Review
When one thinks of codes and ciphers, one naturally thinks of spy craft and espionage. But as McKay explains here, any dead language and its alphabet is a form of code; e.g., ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were baffling to scholars until the discovery and deciphering of the Rosetta stone. McKay takes readers through history, from Julius Caesar's coded communiqués to the Nazis' formidable Enigma code, giving historical context about the codes' necessities, with details about how they were both created and broken. He also explores coded language, from the Bible to Shakespeare to secret Victorian love letters. Entertainingly, he includes ciphers used or broken by fictional figures like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. For those who are interested in the more technical side of code breaking, McKay provides examples of the various codes discussed in each section and how they work. While The Hidden History of Code Breaking is probably a bit too extensive for the casual reader, for history buffs and puzzle meisters it will doubtless prove endlessly intriguing.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist and historian McKay (The Secret Lives of Codebreakers) offers a sweeping examination of codes, ciphers, and other types of encrypted communication from ancient Greece to today's intelligence agencies. In brief sections, McKay catalogs "50 codes that changed the world," delving into their origins, uses, and how to decipher them. Topics covered include an ancient Greek system of rods and strips of paper used for battlefield communication (the jumbled message on the strip of paper could only be deciphered when wound around a rod in a certain way); the ciphers used by the Venerable Bede in medieval England (religious correspondents dabbling in heretical affairs, fearful of interference from the authorities, would use ciphers to prove the authenticity of their letters); and Samuel Morse's system of dots and dashes. A more extensive treatment is given to Bletchley Park, the top-secret British compound where computer scientist Alan Turing and his team cracked the Nazis' Enigma coding machine. Presented in a breezy style, with each section capped by a historically based puzzle for the reader to solve, this delights and intrigues. (Aug.)
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