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

by Richard Belfield

6 FASCINATING STORIES, 6 MYSTERIOUS CODES

Follow the horrific crimes of the ZODIAC and see the symbol-filled letters he sent to local San Francisco newspapers. Could breaking his code lead to the arrest of this still-at-large serial killer?

Learn how the Declaration of Independence was used to decode part of the BEALE PAPERS . Find the decoder key for the rest of its cipher and a $30 million buried treasure awaits you somewhere in Buford County, Virginia.

See how one man directly challenged the CIA by erecting an encoded sculpture called KRYPTOS at the agency’s Langley headquarters―only to prove that his genius could resist the world’s best code-breakers and most powerful decryption software.
Plus three more captivating ciphers . . .

Genres: History, Mathematics, Technology, Nonfiction, Science

281 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

British television producer/director, author and playwright.

He is a Director of Fulcrum TV, a well established independent production company in London.

During the 1990’s, he was the New Statesman’s Internet correspondent.

Reviews

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall good, though chapter 6 is kind of a snooze. I remember when the Kryptos statue went up at the CIA heaquarters and being intrigued by it, and the Beale and Voynich chapters are fascinating. I keep hoping that someone someday will crack the Voynich Manuscript code -- now there is some wacky stuff.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Eevi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read about... well, unsolved ciphers! Kind of shows what could happen if you spend too much time and money trying to solve these puzzles, but the lure is there!

[Kim Lacey · Rating 2 out of 5]

It reads like it was written in response to the hype surrounding Dan Brown. Interesting histories, nonetheless.

[Ben]

woah