Writing with the same animation that infuses his other accounts of historical enigmas and events (Perplexing People, 2006, etc.), Blackwood plunges into the history of codes and ciphers, cryptograms, nomenclators and steganography. In chapters with headers like “Babington, Beer, and Baconian Biliteralism,” he traces many of the ways—from simple to brain-bendingly complicated—that messages have been concealed, from the earliest surviving example (a formula for pottery glaze coded in cuneiform and estimated to date from 1500 BCE) to today’s “public key” cryptography. Along with plenty of photos or images of important code makers and breakers, he supplies (relatively) easy-to-use sidebar examples, charts and instructions for several systems. Readers with Something To Hide will come away from this engaging companion to the even more hands-on likes of Paul Janeczko’s Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing (2004) with not only some new tools, but a great appreciation for the central role codes and ciphers have played in wars and diplomacy through the years. (Nonfiction. 11-16)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-525-47960-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
In glossy textbook style, this latest entry in The Other Half of History series (Women of Ancient Greece, p. 1746, etc.) illuminates the days and lives of wealthy, middle-class, and poor women who lived thousands of years ago in Egypt. The large-scale format of the book allows elaborate full-color photographs to appear on every page, often accompanied by sidebars with brief quotations from ancient Egyptian writers. These provide the book’s main source of interest; Macdonald resorts to a textbook writing style, with deliberately short, declarative sentences that make the material sound more somber than it is. Nevertheless, this book provides a useful tracing of the role of women in history, and would be a good companion reference to Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s classic Mara, Daughter of the Nile (1953) or Sonia Levitin’s Escape from Egypt (1994). (maps, glossary, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-87226-567-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
What lure could cause thousands of people to quit their jobs, leave their families, sleep in tents, move to the wilderness, and eat wormy bread? This is a detailed, exciting account of how the discovery of gold in the streams of California in 1848 created an international frenzy to head to the American West. Schanzer (How We Crossed the West, 1997) uses direct quotes from journals, letters, and accounts written by the forty-niners themselves, giving her book an immediacy and drama others on the subject lack. She chronicles the influx of people lured by tales of wealth as they traveled across the US. The quotations create a colorful picture of the pan-handling life: what miners ate and wore, how they lived, played, struggled to survive, and how many of the people who truly profited from the gold rush were those who sold goods to the miners. Schanzer’s illustrations are dynamic, and as well-researched as the text. (map) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7922-7303-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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