Book and dagger How scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II

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.

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. (Sept.)

At the beginning of World War II, the United States lacked a robust intelligence network. Under the direction of Bill Donovan, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, recruited hundreds of librarians, archivists, and professors to build up a base of knowledge and research skills. Historian Graham (digital humanities, Stony Brook Univ.; You Talkin' to Me?: The Unruly History of New York English) chronicles how these academics reinvented intelligence-gathering while making massive contributions to the American war effort. Scholars such as Adele Kibre, an expert in microphotography, were dispatched to far-flung cities like Stockholm to clandestinely purchase and photograph rare books, technical journals, and propaganda to send back to the States. Another scholar, Joseph Curtiss, went to Istanbul, where he engaged in more traditional espionage. Other academics pored through mundane publications such as railroad schedules and newspapers to produce highly detailed reports about potential bombing targets within Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. VERDICT This deeply researched and engaging account shines a light on a vital but little-known aspect of intelligence gathering. Readers interested in World War II espionage and the role scholars have played in surveillance and reconnaissance campaigns will enjoy this volume.--Chad E. Statler

Bookworms become spooks in this engaging study of wartime American intelligence. Spies aren't always James Bond types, historian and Stony Brook professor Graham notes; some of the earliest members of the World War II--era OSS were literature professors, librarians, and researchers whose common denominator was bibliomania. Founder William Donovan, a lawyer and a passionate book collector, inaugurated a division called Research & Analysis, which "represented something new in the world of spycraft," its scholarly staff charged with researching subjects thoroughly before action was taken. One of Graham's heroes, a formidable woman named Adele Kibre, "dark-haired, wicked-eyed, a classicist by training," logged time in Stockholm acquiring European publications for OSS analysis, including, thanks to her wooing various Nazi officials, plenty of books and papers from the Third Reich. All of Graham's bookworm subjects trained in the dark arts of assassination and disguise, and while many operated in plain sight of the enemy in neutral countries such as Sweden and Turkey, others went deep undercover. Some are relatively well known, such as the assessors who examined stolen Nazi art to return masterworks to their homes. Others figure in the history of scholarship but are little known today, such as the egomaniacal anthropologist Carleton Coon, whose racist theories gave aid and comfort to Nazi theorists but who served in the OSS all the same. Of all the figures in the book, Kibre is the centerpiece, and Graham does good service by highlighting her work and skills, which included concocting whatever persona appealed most to whomever she was dealing with. Graham closes with a note about how some of the scholars helped shape the successor CIA, and she makes a good case for studying the humanities as both an instrument of learning and a weapon of war. Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.