Wednesday March 02, 2005

Dan Brown Digital Fortress

As my wife kindly bought me the other three Dan Brown books in a three for two offer I am now reading them. I wrote about his famous book The De Vinci Code before . Digital fortress is not a bad read, as one reviewer wrote it is a bit like a highly techno charged Clancy book. The story is based around a secret code breaking machine and an ex employee who worked on it who now threatens to release his own freeware ultimate encrytion package, that will make this system useless. Susan Fletcher is the head crpytographer who finds her boyfriend being sent to Spain James Bond fashion to find a key to unlock the "Digital Fortress" the new encrpytion software. Strangely enough he is a teacher and his sudden ability to pull off a series of James Bond stunts makes me believe he was in the wrong job. Better not give much more of the book away else I will spoil it for you but the ending is very tortuous and I was very pleased when it finally came to an end.

So perhaps I am being unkind, it is a book to read on a long plane journey or on holiday. I read to learn and to escape from the busy lives we all lead and this book was interesting enough for that to work.

The Riddle of the Titanic

The book "The Riddle of the Titanic" by Robin Gardiner and Dan Van Der Vat has left my bookshelf to be read on several occasions. The book is an excellent read and starts with the history of the White Star lines, how the "Olympic" class of ships came to be and of course the disaster itself. It also discusses both the UK and US investigations and finally tells us what happened to the main players in this story after the incident.

Villains were:

Captain Smith who had a very dodgy record who in fact crashed the Titanic's sister ship "Olympic" and was going too fast on Titanic's maiden voyage despite ice warnings.

Bruce Ismay the meddling owner who was almost certainly trying to break the crossing record. If the ships logs had been saved they would have shown this.

Missing binoculars from the crows nest that would have helped detect a iceberg earlier on.

The regulations that stipulated the pathetic number of lifeboats needed for an unsinkable ship, also the fact many lifeboats left the doomed ship not full.

Of course the ship was unlucky had it crashed into the iceberg head on the design of the ship would have worked.

There were three Olympics all built by Harland and Wolff

Titanic herself.

Britannic was the third to be launched and her first five voyages were as a hospital ship during the First World War. During sixth voyage, she was sunk after striking a mine in the Aegean sea. She had major changes to her design after the Titanic disaster.

Olympic the first of the triplets lasted the longest only to be cut up after a long life at sea. She was captained by Smith and in fact had several 'incidents' during her lifetime.

An excellent book I would like to buy is The Olympic Class Ships: Olympic, Titanic, Britannic by Mark Chirnside this site reviews the book