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Title: The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet by Shawn James Rosenheim ISBN: 0-8018-5332-X Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.17 (6 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Jargon-choked, but at times insightful.
Comment: This is an unabashedly academic book, and it certainly provides some ammunition for people wishing to play Sokal for a day and make banal snipes at the Humanities. But it also contains some genuine insights about the way our psychological need to keep and uncover secrets has influenced the course of the last century. People looking for a perfectly accurate description of how encryption works should look elsewhere. People looking for an intriguing discussion about *why* people want so badly to encrypt and decrypt things have pretty much nowhere else to look; this is one of the only books I've found on the topic. It's a relatively strong start in an engaging direction of study. Fans of Poe, especially, are likely to find something of value tucked away in this piece of scholarship, though it is at times unnecessarily dense.

Rating: 3
Summary: A good book featuring a timeless author
Comment: Elizabeth Stevens......the word "college" is spelled with two L's. A "genius" would surely know that. By the way, the book isn't half bad either.

Rating: 5
Summary: much better than those inbreds are saying
Comment: If you've gone to colege and have had to endure the [modest] writing of literary critics since the 1960s, this book will read like pure exbasy to your nervous system. Though it functions for me generically as self-help, it's also whimsical and wandering as a good narrative should be. Ultimately meta, Rosenheim's prose is dense but not impossible- if you have been indoctrinated by higher learning to see texts as coded puzzles, you'll find this book exemplifies the technique it decodes. If you are a genius like me, you'll love it, or you are unfit to hold your post.