Review of Book and Dagger

Looks like Nonfiction November should be renamed Nonfiction November: The World War II Years - at least here at Words by Webb. What can I say, I'm captivated by the many facets of this time period. Check out this book and then go bake apple pies! thanksgiving is only two days away.

More About Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II

At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts.

In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS.

These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war.

Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world.

More About Elyse Graham

Elyse Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, a flagship school in the SUNY system. She holds degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT, and is the owner of a very mischievous dog, Victor and two cats, Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 2.

Thoughts About Book and Dagger

I picked this book up on impulse at my local public library, drawn in my the cover. But how much could librarians have to do with spies?

This book was a fascinating read from the mess our (non-existent) intelligence community was after World War I to what became of the scholars who left the classroom to become spies after the war was won. If you're like me, you think of spies as those shady looking characters meeting in cafes to pass documents, secrets, explosives. With this book, Elyse Graham has zoomed way out to show us about the other side of the intelligence community: the people who gather information and decide its significance.

The author did an impressive job of connecting dots between the history we're familiar with and the events that happened behind the scenes. She's turned certain events on their heads when I learned details I was never aware of in the past. This book is populated by a rich cast of characters and the author makes them come alive by sharing their quirks and foibles (as well as doing a little guessing into things they might have said or thought -- all clearly noted as her opinion).

Even if you think you know all there is to know about World War II spies, read this book. Like the people in this book, Elyse Graham dug through mounds of information to share a new slant on World War II spycraft with us.

A Little Extra

Elyse has written several other books under the name EJ White including You Talkin' to Me?, A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet and The Republic of Games.