Codes have decided the fates of empires, countries, and
monarchies throughout recorded history. Mary, Queen of Scots was put
to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for the high crime of treason
after spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham cracked the secret code she
used to communicate with her conspirators. And thus the course of
British history was altered by a few sheets of cryptic prose. This is
just one link in humankind's evolutionary chain of secret
communication, and just one of the fascinating incidents recounted in
The Code Book, written by bestselling author Simon Singh.

Combining a superb storyteller's sense of drama and a scientist's
appreciation for technical perfection, Singh traces the evolution of
secret writing from ancient Greek military espionage to the frontiers
of computer science. The result is an epic tale of human ingenuity,
with examples that range from the poignant to the peculiar to the
world-historical.

There is the case of the Beale ciphers, which involves Wild West
escapades, a cowboy who amassed a vast fortune, a buried treasure
worth $20 million, and a mysterious set of encrypted papers describing
its whereabouts--papers that have baffled generations of cryptanalysts
and captivated hundreds of treasure hunters.

A speedier end to a bloody war was the only reward that could be
promised to the Allied code breakers of World Wars I and II, whose
selfless contributions altered the course of history; but few of them
lived to receive any credit for their top-secret
accomplishments. Among the most moving of these stories is that of the
World War II British code breaker Alan Turing, who gave up a brilliant
career in mathematics to devote himself to the Allied cause, only to
end his years punished by the state for his homosexuality, while his
heroism was ignored. No less heroic were the Navajo code talkers, who
volunteered without hesitation to risk their lives for the Allied
forces in the Japanese theater, where they were routinely mistaken for
the enemy.

Interspersed with these gripping stories are clear mathematical,
linguistic, and technological demonstrations of codes, as well as
illustrations of the remarkable personalities--many courageous, some
villainous, and all obsessive--who wrote and broke them.

All roads lead to the present day, in which the possibility of a truly
unbreakable code looms large. Singh explores this possibility, and the
ramifications of our increasing need for privacy, even as it begins to
chafe against the stated mission of the powerful and deeply secretive
National Security Agency. Entertaining, compelling, and remarkably
far-reaching, this is a book that will forever alter your view of
history, what drives it, and how private that e-mail you just sent
really is.

Included in the book is a worldwide Cipher Challenge--a $15,000 award
will be given by the author to the first reader who cracks the code
successfully. Progress toward the solution will be tracked on The
Code Book website.

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