Authors: Kevin Mitnick and William Simon
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 108
When we decided to adopt and redo the backyard simultaneously, we knew we had to economize. In addition to firing up my library card again, I also decided that I would downgrade my Audible account to the "Gold" plan (one book a month), and listen to everything that I'd never quite gotten around. It's a really bad habit, but Audible has these great $4.95 book sales and these "buy three credits for $20 sales" and I am a sucker for them. Once I stopped driving to Provo regularly, I stopped listening to as many audiobooks, but I didn't stop buying them at the same rate, so I always listened to the ones I thought I'd like best, while books like Ghost in the Wires sunk to the bottom of the pile.
Anyway, I've found some gems while listening to the books in this pile, but Ghost in the Wires was not among them. Honestly, I think a lot of that is because a girl like me has no business spending 14 hours listening to a computer hacker and phone phreaker talk about how he manipulated every system he could get his hands on (just for the fun of it) and then whining about how he ended up in jail when he got caught. It might be a great book for the right kind of reader, because Mitnick's voice is engaging (if a little whiny and self-important-- this is a guy with an agenda, for sure) and his story, once I realized that the whole book would be about how he logged into systems and created back doors and then came back and downloaded secret information (not to do anything bad with it), wasn't all that boring. Okay, a little boring. I kept saying I was going to give it up, and I actually started this book last spring, but when I started it again, I kept waiting and waiting for it to get interesting, and then, about 2/3 of the way through, I felt too married to it to quit.
1 comment:
He wasn't whining or self-important, he was misrepresented by the press over and over again and treated unfairly and illegally in some cases by the justice system and government. You have to put yourself in hus place and imagine the outrage you'd feel at being abused by the justice system like he was, it's incredibly disturbing what they can get away with.
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