This book's publicist did all the right things in marketing the book: bright cover, "Fresh Air" interview, reviews in the NYT, WSJ, Economist. Heck it may have benefitted from physics interest from the Higgs Boson announcement. And I have a hard time believing that nobody thought of this earlier so I was excited to read about something that isn't tragic or have a lot of attached controversy.

The writing is excellent and the author does a good job of making something technical and hard to describe visually interesting enough to keep you going. He travels around the world and looks at the hidden architecture and meets the personalities of the exchanges where networks meet. He's comfortable enough with the Internet to learn how to do a traceroute to see where his data comes from but doesn't get so technical that the reader gets their eyes glazed over. I don't think an IP address is even quoted.

I'm giving three stars rather than four despite the good writing because it felt to me like the story felt like it was extended rather than deepened from a GQ or Atlantic feature article. It's not a slog but it could have been shorter.