The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Stymied the World's Greatest Cryptographers Book

Belfield is capable of writing engagingly and accessably about topics most people find difficult, and he certainly has a fabulous sense of humor -- some of his turns of phrase had me chortling and reading out loud to Sarah -- which makes my overall lukewarm impression of this book curious; I should have liked it more than I actually did. But though the individual elements are interesting enough, the overall impression is very scattershot; he constantly references later chapters in earlier ones, for instance, assuming a familiarity with the material that the audience doesn't yet have. The organization of the book is scattershot -- the stories are arranged neither by chronology, nor fame of the unbroken code/cipher, nor complexity -- and Belfield alternates between treating his work as a serious attempt to explore the cryptological lessons/implications of the unbroken code/cipher and a more mass-market pop-science approach. This has some fascinating moments, but overall, not as interesting as it appeared on a bookstore pick-up-and-peruse.