Reviews are hard to come by, especially good reviews, and particularly any reviews at all for books out from small presses. Given this unfortunate reality, made worse by the deaths of the great majority of newspaper book review sections and columns and the cancelation of magazines such as Book Forum, I’m especially pleased to share a terrific, very detailed review of my nonfiction book The Devil’s Toy Box: Exposing and Defusing Promethean Terrorists. The review appeared in the December 2022 issue of The Journal of Homeland Security Affairs and was written by Ted Lewis, a computer industry pioneer and one of my former professors at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Here’s an excerpt for those of you who don’t want to click over to the full review:
“Sometimes using real exploits with real people and other times using made-up scenarios, Fox brings the reader inside the heads of the bad guys. Over half of the book is synthetic – made-up stories used to teach by allegory. It can be disturbing because it is so real.” …
“Fox dives into the mental states of the terrorists who bring calamity down on unsuspecting people, so the reader gets a visceral feeling in addition to the facts. It is a mechanism that works well in homeland security because there are plenty examples in real life as well as opportunity for imagining what might happen. And this is his ultimate goal – to get the student-reader to think out of the Devil’s box and prevent or avoid the known unknowns.
“His stories can get bloody and horrific as they should, because it is real life. I especially enjoyed reading about the black hat who hacked into a patient’s computer controlled prosthetic because I wear a pacemaker. Pacemakers are notoriously easy to hack into. The criminal can simply command it to stop pacing or run wild, pumping too much blood until you die . In another semi-realistic episode, he dramatizes the take-over of a truck, by a hacker intending to do harm. Once under the control of a malicious hacker, cars and trucks can be used as weapons.” …
“I recommend this book for the lay reader who wants to see what it is like to be a terrorist and how homeland security practitioners approach the terrorist problem. It makes entertaining reading for the non-expert, non-homeland security practitioner as well. I can’t wait for the movie.”
You and me both, Ted!
