An engaging resurrection of a significant player in the world of cryptology.
The wife of the groundbreaking cryptoanalyst William Friedman finally gets her due as equal partner in their pioneering codebreaking work over 30 years.
While her husband was long treated by the National Security Agency as the “founder of the science of modern American cryptology,” it was the partnership with his wife, Elizebeth, that drove the two to brilliant heights in the field. Journalist Fagone (Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America, 2013, etc.) does a bang-up research effort in unearthing the true story of this humble Midwestern codebreaker, who often gave her husband the credit while her own work (and much of his) had to remain in secrecy because of concerns of national security. However, the sexism of the time would also play a role in how her work was undervalued and underreported; as the author notes, “when powerful men started to tell the story [e.g., FBI director J. Edgar Hoover], they left her out of it.” A remarkable meeting of the minds occurred when Elizebeth, a recent college graduate, was introduced to William, a mild-mannered geneticist, at the wealthy Chicago businessman George Fabyan’s fabulous Riverbank “laboratory” in Geneva, Illinois, in 1916. Elizebeth had been hired to figure out the cipher in Shakespeare’s First Folio that was supposed to reveal its author as Francis Bacon, and while she lost faith in the project, she found she had a knack for code-breaking. With the war escalating, she and William led the “Riverbank Department of Ciphers,” fed by a stream of encrypted messages from Washington, D.C. Over time, they developed into a fine-tuned team, and Fagone explains without arduous technicality how the process worked—then pen and paper, without machines. Between the wars, the two wrote books, and Elizebeth helped crack messages from rumrunners for the Coast Guard. World War II brought the challenges of breaking Magic and Enigma, among other astounding achievements across the globe.
An engaging resurrection of a significant player in the world of cryptology.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243048-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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