| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

David Kahn. The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. xxi, 318. $32.50.
Herbert Osborn Yardley is hardly a household name, yet he is the most famous United States codebreaker thanks to a sensational book—The American Black Chamber—he wrote seventy-five years ago. Heretofore he has not had a biographer, but he certainly has one now.	1
There is a truism, well known to historians, that biographers either love or hate their subjects. David Kahn has written that rarest of commodities: a balanced biography of Yardley, warts and all. In so doing he has reinterpreted Yardley's role and what we know about early American communications intelligence. Kahn undertook an exhaustive search covering virtually every archive in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Japan that could conceivably hold documents relating to Yardley. Kahn also interviewed virtually everyone still living who knew Yardley and his contemporaries. The result is a tour de force, a definitive biography that will lay to rest most of the controversies swirling around Yardley's career.	. . .

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