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Reviewer: Michael Roy Williams

This review is about a month late in being returned to the editorial offices of . There is a good reason. Having heard a lot about the book, I was anxious to read it. It is so full of errors and trite statements that I spent the best part of a month reading a few pages, throwing it down in disgust, then spending time the next day looking for it in order to continue with the task. Don't misunderstand me, it is a good read—equivalent to any novel—but it has very little academic or scholarly use. The stories are interesting, but a lot of them are well known already. If you don't mind glaring errors of fact concerning some of the machines Levy is describing (which suggests that the people he is describing are equally misrepresented), or even that he attributes the terms “hack” and “hacker” to the 1950s members of a model railroad club at MIT (when they have been in the English language since the 1700s), then you might like to borrow a copy of Hackers to read in the bath. The book itself doesn't even look good on your bookshelf. It is printed, cut, and bound in such a way that it resembles the products produced during the paper shortages of the Second World War. I am sure that the book will be much appreciated by a general audience, but not by computer professionals (other than the hackers themselves). Three hackers mentioned in the book actually went so far as to let their names be quoted on the dust jacket under capsule reviews like “fascinating,” “intriguing,” and “fun.” It is amazing how much more “intriguing” a story can be when your name is listed as the subject of 17 entries in the index.