#48m, "Seizing the Enigma"

"Seizing The Enigma: The Race To Break The German U-boat Codes, 1939-1943"

David Kahn

A fascinating account of the famous German Enigma code machine, as used by the Third Reich before and during the Second World War. Kahn relates the history of the machine as well as techniques and trends in cryptology--codes and codebreaking--starting around the turn of the 20th century. The story follows a several groups of cryptologists and mathematicians who were up against the most advanced cipher creator in history up to that point.

In the past, secret codes had been constructed using more or less simple word and letter replacement techniques. An elementary example of a coding technique would be to assign each letter in the alphabet to some other letter (A= R, B = M, C = E, and so on). A message could then be enciphered using this alternate alphabet, called a cipher key, and deciphered using the same key by the message recipient. This method had many flaws, however, and was easily cracked using rudimentary statistical and linguistic techniques. Even more advanced ways of coding messages still fell back on this basic premise. The Enigma machine, however, used a combination of mechanical and electrical elements to create ciphers that were, ostensibly, unbreakable. These elements have been calculated to provide a military-grade Enigma machine, as used on German U-boats in WW2, with about 156 quintillion possible code cipher combinations. That is what Polish and British (and to a lesser extent American) cryptologists were up against as they sought to break German codes during the war. The story of how they both failed and succeeded, and the accompanying tales including battles, high-stakes raids, military and political hubris, and determination makes for a rewarding read.

The book is extremely detailed and well-researched. The mathematical parts, and the technical descriptions of the working of the machine, is difficult for a layperson like me to follow, but still highly interesting. One of the highlights of my reading so far this year.

#whatIreadin2017

#47, "The Cardinal of the Kremlin"

"The Cardinal of the Kremlin"

Tom Clancy

Not as good as "The Hunt for Red October," this novel started and ended quite well. There was a long stretch in the middle that dragged a bit, but it all came together in the final 60 pages, which made for a great finish. I really like Tom Clancy's style--easy to read, yet occasionally extremely technical and precise. I enjoy when something happens in a book that I have to look up elsewhere to understand a bit of how it works. I think I'm going to try to read more Clancy soon.

#whatIreadin2017

#43, "The President's First Year"

"The President's First Year"

Douglas Cohn

A promising premise marred by poor planning. The object of the book is ostensibly to examine the first year of each of the first 44 presidents, an initially intriguing object. While the author does this, looking at the frequent blunders and rare successes in the early parts of each presidency, he takes, in my opinion, an overly wide historical perspective. By that, I mean to say that he reports not only the first, or "freshman," year (the term also used of legislators and appropriated for the Executive) of each President, but also looks at the events that led up to that year, sometimes going back a decade or more, and often giving a detailed account of the balance of his term in office. The context provided is usually interesting, but I would have preferred a more detailed and pinpoint examination of what each President did, or did not do, in the first 365 days of his Presidency. This problem of wide reporting is compounded by the peculiar--no, the downright strange way in which the presidents are broken up. Instead of a linear historical path traced from Washington to Obama, the author groups Presidents into arbitrary categories, such as loner Presidents (Jefferson, Carter, Obama), witchhunters (Adams and Eisenhower), some general presidents (Harrison, Grant, Hayes), and of course many others. While these men may have had some things in common, in the end, as the author himself says repeatedly, no Presidency is a copy of another. Each is unique from its beginning, and therefore to bunch some of them together in this way proves merely distracting instead of enlightening. There is too many variables to properly compare and contrast so many different men and circumstances. This mean that the chapters fly here and there throughout history, from Civil War to the Great Depression, back to Nullification, jumping to the Panic of 1893 to the civil rights movement. The lack of historical continuity makes it very difficult to follow trends, to trace the evolution of the country or the presidency, or to even gain bearings on whichever president we come to next. This is truly unfortunate, for Cohn has a good style and has done much work to compile the vast amount of activities and actions that accompanied 44 presidents (though William Henry Harrison's chapter wasn't very long).

The big takeaway is that not a single President had a good first year.

#whatIreadin2017.