Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age

Price (The Pixar Touch) puts his expertise in history and technology to excellent use in his latest book. Following the exploits of the motley collection of geniuses installed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, he weaves a superb narrative, at once compelling and relatable, about the technological innovations used to break the Nazis’ many military and police codes and ciphers. In this book, the code breakers come to life as people grappling with personal conflicts and politics while working together (and sometimes against each other) in the relatively egalitarian environment at Bletchley. Many of the group’s innovations receive notice in Price’s work, but he focuses mainly on the events and people involved in the invention of Colossus—the first programmable, electronic, digital computer, which was designed to break the German army’s Lorenz cipher. Readers will encounter familiar names, such as Winston Churchill, along with less prominent figures, like the British mathematician Max Newman.