The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing
| Date: 08 May 2011, 01:31
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Abridged Version (abridged by the author).
Amazon.com
"Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break," writes David Kahn in this massive (almost 1,200 pages) volume. Most of The Codebreakers focuses on the 20th century, especially World War II. But its reach is long. Kahn traces cryptology's origins to the advent of writing. It seems that as soon as people learned how to record their thoughts, they tried to figure out ways of keeping them hidden. Kahn covers everything from the theory of ciphering to the search for "messages" from outer space. He concludes with a few thoughts about encryption on the Internet.
Some of the things you will learn in THE CODEBREAKERS
- How secret Japanese messages were decoded in Washington hours before Pearl Harbor.
- How German codebreakers helped usher in the Russian Revolution.
- How John F. Kennedy escaped capture in the Pacific because the Japanese failed to solve a simple cipher.
- How codebreaking determined a presidential election, convicted an underworld syndicate head, won the battle of Midway, led to cruel Allied defeats in North Africa, and broke up a vast Nazi spy ring.
- How one American became the world's most famous codebreaker, and another became the world's greatest.
- How codes and codebreakers operate today within the secret agencies of the U.S. and Russia.
- And incredibly much more.
"For many evenings of gripping reading, no better choice can be made than this book."
-Christian Science Monitor
A Note on the Abridged Version
MANY PEOPLE have urged me to put out a paperback edition of The Codebreakers. Here it is.
It comprises about a third of the original. This was as big as the publishers and I could make it and still
keep the price within reason.
In cutting the book, I retained mainly stories about how codebreaking has affected history, particularly
in World War II, and major names and stages in the history of cryptology. I eliminated all source notes and
most of the technical matter, as well as material peripheral to strict codebreaking such as biographies, the
invention of secondary cipher systems, and miscellaneous uses of various systems.
I had no space for new material, but I did correct the errors reported to me and updated a few items.
The chapters have been slightly rearranged.
Readers wanting to know more about a specific point should consult the text and notes of the original.
If any reader wishes to offer any corrections or to tell me of his own experiences in this field, I would
be very grateful if he would send them to me.
-D.K.
Windsor Gate
Great Neck, New York
PassWord: www.freebookspot.com
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