Book Review: "Exploding the Phone"

"Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell" by Phil Lapsley is an epic piece of hacker history. The book is heavily researched and does the topic amazing justice in it's coverage of the underground phone phreak scene. It's the kind of book that goes above and beyond to bring you all details of the dead art, many details which may have been lost to time, save this text. The book is really cheap for 450 pages / 12hrs, ranging from ~5-17. I listened to the book on audible, it was packed with facts and kept me entertained though out, similar to books like "Kingpin" or "Ghost in the Wires". Overall, I give it 8/10 stars for being a thorough and crucial part of hacker history.  It's the best text I've ever read on the phreaking scene, covering the technical aspects of phreaking as well as highlighting some of the characters that led the movement.  The book does an amazing job describing the personalities of some early phreaks, such as the eccentric and sometimes offputting John 'Captain Crunch' Draper, or the quick-witted and entrepreneurial Steve Wozniak. The following are the chapters of the book, in my typical review style, such that you may gain more insight to the topics the book covers:

Foreword by Steve Wozniak
A Note on Names and Tenses
Chapter 1: Fine Arts
Chapter 2: Birth Of a Playground
Chapter 3: Cat and Canary
Chapter 4: The Largest Machine in the World
Chapter 5: Blue Box
Chapter 6: "Some People Collect Stamps"
Chapter 7: Headache
Chapter 8: Blue Box Bookies
Chapter 9: Little JoJo Learns to Whistle
Chapter 10: Bill Acker Learns to Play the Flute
Chapter 11: The Phone Freaks Of America
Chapter 12: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Chapter 13: Counterculture
Chapter 14: Busted
Chapter 15: Pranks
Chapter 16: The Story Of a War
Chapter 17: A Little Bit Stupid
Chapter 18: Snitch
Chapter 19: Crunched
Chapter 20: Twilight
Chapter 21: Nightfall
Epilogue
Sources and Notes
Acknowledgements

The book features an awesome companion site, which includes an expanse of information and articles on the phreaking scene. It's a great resource for anyone looking to learn more about phone phreaking, let alone see that the book is as authentic as it claims. An excerpt of the book on Wired shows how intriguing and immersive the story is, putting you right next to the charters as opposed to maintaining a totally historical vantage point. The book also talks about fascinating stories such as organized crime using phreaking techniques, the phone companies using signal intelligence and monitoring to catch fraudsters, and even stories about how the phone companies got to big and had to be broken up into smaller companies. Unsurprisingly, the book is part of Palo Alto's Cyber Security Canon, because it is such a well rounded text on an important part of hacker history. In fact there are a ton of good reviews out there on this book. The following is a presentation by the author, Phil Lapsley where he talks about many of the themes from the book at the Usenix conference.