Code Book (Paperback: Anchor Books: 432 pages)

Enhanced Muze Note

Singh's approach is to make each of a series of historical incidents the frame for holding the reader's interest as he fills in technical details of successive coding systems. His exposition is especially effective at putting the reader in the code breaker's shoes, facing each new, apparently unbreakable code, until the discovery of a breakthrough idea uncovers a new form of vulnerability....The almost universal fascination with codes undoubtedly derives from the extraordinary feats of ingenuity that have gone into devising and breaking them, as well as their enormous impact on world events. Singh's book offers more than its share of both.

Enhanced Muze Note

A former producer for the BBC who has a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, Singh knows his subject, and he is a skillful popularizer of it. It would be harder to imagine a clearer or more fascinating presentation of cryptology and decryptology than nonspecialists will get in this book.

Enhanced Muze Note

[This book] is a useful summary of the enciphering and deciphering thought-processes of some of the world's most powerful bureaucracies, from classical times to the ending of the Cold War and into a third millenium--a world of international terrorism, money-laundering, and drug-running....Singh has already been hailed as a leading member of a generation of American and British science-writers whose success indicates that the reading public can cope with dizziness as the latest theories of numbers and random uncertainties in the new cosmology whiz by them.