The Code Book
by Simon Singh | 
Big Bang
by Simon Singh | 
Fermat's Enigma
by Simon Singh | 
The Botany of Desire
by Michael Pollan | 
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee | 
A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin | 
The Sixth Extinction
by Elizabeth Kolbert | 
Cod
by Mark Kurlansky | 
Salt
by Mark Kurlansky | 
The Disappearing Spoon
by Sam Kean | 
The Johnstown Flood
by David McCullough | 
Hackers
by Steven Levy | 
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
by Dan Egan | 
The Demon in the Freezer
by Richard Preston | 
The Information
by James Gleick | 
Meetings with Remarkable Trees
by Thomas Pakenham |
Reading the Forested Landscape
by Tom Wessels |
Changes in the Land
by William Cronon | 
Coming of Age In The Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris | 
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
by Steven Johnson |
How to make it, break it, hack it, crack it. The secret history of codes and code breaking. Simon Singh's best-selling title The Code Book now re-issued for the young-adult market. The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. Simon Singh brings life to an amazing story of puzzles, codes, languages and riddles -- revealing the continual pursuit to disguise and uncover, and to work out the secret languages of others. Codes have influenced events throughout history, both in the stories of those who make them and those who break them. The betrayal of Mary Queen of Scots and the cracking of the enigma code that helped the Allies in World War II are major episodes in a continuing history of cryptography. In addition to stories of intrigue and warfare, Simon Singh also investigates other codes, the unravelling of genes and the rediscovery of ancient languages and most tantalisingly, the Beale ciphers, an unbroken code that could hold the key to a USD20 million treasure.