Writing book reviews is one of the more important but least rewarded of all academic activities. Every professional researcher, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, relies extensively on book reviews to keep current with a large and growing literature. As useful as they are to the scholarly community, however, academic book reviews rarely attract much attention. The exception is when the book under review is also a popular best-seller. An excerpted version of my review of George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral (Pantheon, 2012), originally published in the Annals of the History of Computing, has been picked up by the IEEE Computer Society.