A review by bramboomen
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone
4.0
I like a lot about this book, but the title is just awful. Everytime I took the book out of my bag it felt like I was being clickbaited (readbaited? bookbaited?).
What I liked very much was that the book read like a novel instead of a biography and got me immediately invested in the subject of the Friedmans and cryptography. Also, I have never been much of a WWII history-buff, but I must say that Fagone really got me interested in this part of the history. There were some minor things that I liked less. First Fagone described William Friedman as a brilliant man who batteled with depression, the fact that he then sometimes put him on the page as a whiny, needy little man felt therefore a little... harsch. Another thing is that I really liked Fagones writing style, but sometimes he felt the need to hype it up with "smashing codes" and his superlative awe for the scientific method. These moments just stood out and kept annoying me once every while.
This was however one of the most fun biographies I've read so far!
What I liked very much was that the book read like a novel instead of a biography and got me immediately invested in the subject of the Friedmans and cryptography. Also, I have never been much of a WWII history-buff, but I must say that Fagone really got me interested in this part of the history. There were some minor things that I liked less. First Fagone described William Friedman as a brilliant man who batteled with depression, the fact that he then sometimes put him on the page as a whiny, needy little man felt therefore a little... harsch. Another thing is that I really liked Fagones writing style, but sometimes he felt the need to hype it up with "smashing codes" and his superlative awe for the scientific method. These moments just stood out and kept annoying me once every while.
This was however one of the most fun biographies I've read so far!