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Book and Dagger

How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II

ebook
1 of 7 copies available
1 of 7 copies available

The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war

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.

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    • Library Journal

      April 1, 2024

      Written like a spy thriller, this work by historian Graham (SUNY Stony Brook; You Talkin' to Me?) details how the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, recruited academics as spies at the start of WWII. Librarians, humanities professors, and more were trained in tradecraft and undertook missions that helped defeat the Nazis. With a 150K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from August 1, 2024
      James Bond famously liked his martinis shaken, not stirred. The spies that historian Graham portrays likely preferred their tea with milk, no sugar. A genteel lot of librarians, academicians, historians, and researchers, the civilians recruited to form the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) in the early days of WWII had more experience lurking in library stacks than skulking around the grimy back alleys of foreign capitals. And yet it was precisely this expertise working among ephemera and archives that made them so attractive to those tasked with forming an intelligence-gathering organization that could provide information critical to winning the war. It was an eclectic and erudite group recruited to buy rare books, collect maps, parse railroad schedules, and sift through newspapers searching for the kind of "hidden in plain sight" data that revealed patterns of operations, weaknesses of troops and supplies, and plots for future incursions. Entertainingly conveyed, with great respect and deep appreciation for their ingenuity and drive, Graham's history is a powerful symphony for these unsung heroes whose professional skills and personal courage brought down the Nazi state. The modern intelligence community owes its existence to their rigor and resourcefulness.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers fascinated by espionage will be eager to checkout Graham's fresh telling of the surprising story of the OSS.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 23, 2024
      This entertaining survey from historian Graham (You Talkin’ to Me?) depicts how a love of books helped the Allies win the war against Nazi Germany. Graham profiles a half dozen of the “hundreds” of “mild-mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians” who were recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created at the start of the war because the U.S. was “utterly outmatched” in spy craft by both its allies and its enemies. These “humble drudges” with a “superhuman resistance to boredom” were tasked with reading through enemy newspapers, telephone books, railway schedules, photographs, and trash. Graham spotlights Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who compiled exhaustive studies of North Africa’s railways; Adele Kibre, an archivist who embedded as a spy in neutral Sweden, where she recorded Third Reich newspapers and books on microfilm, which she sent back to Washington, D.C.; Varian Fry, a graduate student at Columbia University who provided U.S. visas to more than 1,500 refugees in Paris, including Hannah Arendt; and undercover art historians who helped track down artworks stolen by the Nazis. Enriched by Graham’s exuberant prose (“They acted as sleuths, tracking the oleaginous smell of paint and blood from murdered households to gutted archives... to stables and cellars and mines”), this is a colorful salute to some of WWII’s more bookish heroes.

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  • English

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