This book provides a fascinating look at how academia revolutionized intelligence gathering during World War II, focusing on key operations in the European Theater, including D-Day, Norway, deception tactics, and the work of the Ritchie Boys. Highlights like the Monuments Men protesting the removal of German art and the CIA’s connection to the Iowa Writers Workshop were particularly intriguing. However, the narrative suffered from an overuse of imagined scenarios and conversations, which made it feel more like a spy novel than a rigorous work of non-fiction. While it covered a lot of ground with interesting points, the lack of fidelity to primary sources left me disappointed. Three stars.

Librarians were the first of those recruited into the new spy efforts born in the WWII area. Will be ordering for our book club. Great read!

A really compelling story and well researched, but I did NOT like all the times the author started saying "perhaps she was wearing..." or "maybe he said..." I realize this is because there wasn't hard evidence, but it was like breaking the fourth wall and it was jarring. Hooray for librarians, though!

Book and Dagger is not the only recent publication to detail the work of librarians and academics in the espionage campaigns of World War II. In 2019 there was Scholars of Mayhem by Daniel C Guiet and Timothy Smith followed by 2020's Information Wars by Kathy Peiss. All three books are works of research and scholarship, but Book and Dagger presents the materials in a lively and engaging way.

Graham presents the narrative chronologically, describing the recruitment, training and changing and highly challenging situations those featured experienced. The person at the center of the book is Adele Kibre, an American archivist and medievalists. She had lived in Europe for most of the 1930s working as a researcher for hire who would photograph European Library materials for American academics. This background was key to her success as an agent in Sweden during the war where she was tasked with capturing copies of public documents. From these analysists were able to derive a clearer pictures of German capabilities or create strategies to thwart their war strategies and economic production.

Graham also profiles the careers both official and secretive of the controversial anthropologist Carletoon Coon, Yale professor Sherman Kent and a few others. It is not comprehensive, as there were hundreds of agents, but highlight detailed for those described. Chapters alternate between the different agents while also looking at specific missions or surveying general strategies and workflows.

Graham also notes the differences between the endings of wars. After world war I/the great war, many of the belligerent powers wound down their espionage operations meaning they had to restart or reinvent organizations. This was not the case after world war II, especially in the United States, where the work of those featured was instrumental in the creation of the CIA. Graham argues that humanities studies were key to the success of several agents and should be a necessary component of any education.

Recommended to readers of history, espionage and World War II.

I read quite a bit of Speculative Fiction. I read almost as much History. What I find difficult, and what Book and Dagger is an unfortunate example of, is "speculative history". The author cautions the reader in the Introduction that she includes "occasional imagined scenes" for "the sake of continuity". This is, of course, not the first occurrence of this in history or biography. In my view, too much attention is played in our culture to the idea of "alternative facts" for this to be included in a work of history.

What a fascinating book! In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham pulls back the curtain on the Intelligence War and reveals that the undercover heroes of WW2 weren't dashing James Bond types.. Rather, they were unassuming men and women of academia. These professors and librarians not only played a vital part in winning the war,, but they helped create modern intelligence gathering

From Instanbul to Norway to Paris, Graham's book is chock full of anecdotes about ordinary citizens doing extraordinary work. The book also serves as a how-to of sorts, as Graham demonstrates how many of the espionage tools work. You'll learn how to create an effective whisper campaign, how to misdirect the enemy, the various ways to make invisible ink and more.

Finally, the book is a love-letter to the power of reading and books. In this age of STEM and business education, Grahm provides a strong argument on the importance of studying humanities.

If you are interested in WW2 or espionage, you will enjoy this book. If you're a writer, you'll find yourself discovering dozens of plot bunnies. (I know I did.!) Thank you Netgalley for an advanced read in exchange for this honest review.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government lacked a dedicated intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services, or OSS—the precursor to the CIA—was hastily formed and scrambled for agents. Without actual spies to recruit, they had to turn to the next best thing: University professors, archivists, and librarians. After all, who is better suited to looking for information, deciphering codes, and explaining their findings than an academic? And most importantly, they have a spy’s best trait: The ability to blend in be completely forgettable. In the words of one official, the ideal spy is “someone who would have trouble getting the attention of a waiter.” So picture it: In 1942 hundreds of eggheads, men and women alike, were recruited by the OSS, instructed at spy schools, then sent to places like Istanbul or Stockholm, often under the guise of collecting and inspecting rare books. Once there, they would engage in bona fide spycraft: setting up listening posts, intercepting communications, liaising with resistance groups, and maybe even carrying out the occasional assassination. I say “maybe” because lots of what these men and women actually did is lost to history or top secret classification. Elyse Graham if forthright whenever she needs to fudge the historical record in service of a story. Passages detailing what may have happened are clearly marked—and they crackle with the best of spy fiction.

At the end of World War One, the United States dismantled its intelligence system because the "War To End All Wars" had made it redundant! When Hitler came to power in Germany, other European nations had small and woefully antiquated ("Gentleman don't read each other's mail") services that were no match for the Nazi juggernaut. In the summer of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt tasked General William Donovan with solving the problem. Donovan's solution involved recruiting scholars, librarians, academics, and other "library rats" to use their specific skills to acquire and organize the necessary information. These Research and Analysis (R&A) agents were known as the Chairborne Division, but their efforts led to astonishing action in the field.
This book needed to be written because few people have any awareness of the stories it tells and the current educational climate has allowed technology to eclipse the humanities. Most people think of secret agents as they are portrayed in movies (Sean Connery as James Bond rather than Alec Guinness as George Smiley) and popular novels. The fictional spy is handsome or beautiful, flamboyant, sybaritic, and he or she relies on high-tech gadgets and personal charisma to achieve their ends. In real life, they would be discovered and probably dead before they accomplished anything. (Real spies are told they can have a weapon or a cover story, but not both.)
Donovan's recruits were ordinary-looking people who spent their time in classrooms, bookstores, libraries, and offices. They had endless patience for details and consumed astonishing quantities of seemingly dull information that they knew how to present in its most useful forms. They pretended to be book buyers and copy editors, both apolitical and, apparently, stupid. Living under constant threat of arrest, torture, and death in cities like Stockholm, Istanbul, and others, they sought to stay under the radar of both German soldiers and the local police who were often more dangerous.
The first half of Book and Dagger, is, unfortunately, a bit slow, as the author goes into sometimes stultifying detail about the efforts of agents to photograph and microfilm things like telephone books and discarded newspapers. What kept me reading were the fascinating stories about things like the Himmler Stamp (a brilliant fictional creation used to undermine German morale) and the courier in occupied France who escaped arrest while transporting her radio in the basket of her bicycle by telling a police officer who questioned her that she was transporting her radio and was going to report him to her contact in London. He thought she was just teasing him and let her off with a warning!
The second half was more fun to read as it included lengthy (and fascinating!) sections about chamoflage artists, radio operators, saboteurs, and a network of art experts known as the Monument Men.
Book and Dagger celebrates the power of small groups and dedicated individuals to overcome a seemingly unbeatable enemy that was limited by its own greed, bigotry, and lack of imagination. I was surprised to learn that bombing a city to destroy morale actually had the opposite effect. Another surprise was that the United States was saved from falling victim to the same selfishness and greed shown by the Nazis only because some of those "library rats" took a stand against their bosses.
Elyse Graham certainly did her homework with research and she writes well. I would suggest that potential readers skim the first half of this book and enjoy the rest.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Ecco for granting me a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

As a librarian who loves historical research, I was so excited to read this book. It's very well-researched (the last quarter of the ebook is all references), and the author's enthusiasm for research is evident throughout the book. I particularly appreciated the author's efforts to always indicate when a scenario or someone's feelings were imagined rather than known -- it's a pet peeve of mine when authors who write historical accounts give the impression that a conversation or an emotion is fact rather than conjured up from the author's imagination. This author drew a very clear line between what is known and what can only be imagined, and she always noted this in the book.

I enjoyed the informal writing style and thought most of the book was engaging. I did feel that the book could be better organized. The author jumped around to different topics and people, and it was sometimes confusing. Given how much information is in the book, I would have liked to see more organization (and some things probably could have been left out, like the chapter about art recovery after the war). I also was expecting more about the actual academics and librarians who were spies during the war, what their jobs were like, the work they did, and how that work helped the war effort. While there was definitely some of that, the book also went off on many unnecessary tangents.

My thanks to NetGalley and Ecco for the eARC.

Book and Dagger tells the story of the formation of the US’s spy service, which at the time was called the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. Its job was to gather information and then “to turn information into intelligence - to take the mass of incoming material and get the truth out of it.” To do that, a cadre of university professors, librarians and art experts were brought in.
I was amazed to learn that after WWI, the US had basically disbanded its intelligence services, because “gentlemen didn’t read each other’s mail”. Ditto for the British. So, the OSS was basically starting from scratch.
I did struggle with the initial chapters of the book when Graham resorted to an informal style, writing as if the reader was being trained. “Your clothes and your accessories should always be a little old.” Graham attempts to fill in the numerous blanks with a lot of “might haves” or “one imagines”.
The book focuses on three individuals - Joseph Curtiss operating in Istanbul, Sherman Kent, operating out of the DC offices and Adele Kibre, operating out of Stockholm. It took a while before Graham began giving actual examples of what the spies were doing to provide aid to the Army. Once she does, the book definitely improves. I found the book to be uneven and was really only interested in the actual examples of how the spies aided the war effort.
I enjoyed learning more about the war in Africa and Norway and how the neutral countries played into the war. And I really enjoyed the chapter on the ghost war that was fought alongside the real one. Thanks to some fiction, I was aware of parts of it, such as Operation Mincemeat and the decoy units in Scotland, but this book gave a real overview of the extent of the ghost war. The chapter on the Art Looting Investigation Unit felt out of place, as it didn’t so much play into how the OSS helped with the actual war effort.
Graham’s book is a reminder of the importance of the US melting pot. The “university-in-exile” that was the R & A section of the SOE was made up of European, often Jewish, exiles, young women mathematicians, Blacks and people with disabilities. It was everyone the Nazis rejected.
My thanks to Netgalley and Ecco for an advance copy of this book.

This was fascinating and so deeply researched! What a wonderful accompaniment to the wide world of fictional spy stories... I wouldn't be surprised at all to see this optioned for a screen adaptation someday. (In fact, I sort of hope that happens!) Pick up a copy of this book for holiday gifting if you've got a spy enthusiast on your list!

This book has been well-thought out with a lot of research. I enjoy that each chapter covers a different part of the spy work the spies pulled off. This does not follow one spy or even one type of spy, instead it really shows how the war was won through information gathering and why non-military types were more successful than those who had been formally trained in warfare. Some of these stories I knew, most I did not. I really enjoyed it.

The U.S. found itself in need of an intelligence agency during WWII. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA was formed. The OSS turned to academia, just like the monuments men!

Elyse Graham writes a very well researched history of the academics of the OSS. Elyse used personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to write “Book and Dagger” It reads like a novel! I can’t get enought about the men and women of OSS and counterpart of SOE.

Thank you NetGalley and Ecco for an advanced copy. #BookandDagger #NetGalley.

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham is a brilliant book about the little-known history of early spycraft in America. Graham has written a well-researched and entertaining book about how professors and librarians helped found the CIA and crafted a new form of spycraft that focused on the importance of research and information in unexpected places. Graham's writing is intelligent, funny, and wry, making this book a joy to read. Book and Dagger covers a fascinating piece of history in an accessible manner. I recommend this book to anyone interested in World War II, spycraft, and academia.

Elyse Graham's Book and Dagger offers a fascinating dive into an underexplored facet of World War II espionage—the recruitment of librarians and academics as spies by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This book uncovers a unique and intriguing chapter of wartime intelligence, blending history with the personal stories of those who balanced the roles of scholars and spies.
Graham explores how the very skills that make librarians and professors ideal candidates for academic roles—attention to detail, rigorous research methods, and a deep understanding of historical contexts—also made them exceptional spies. Their occupations gave them perfect cover and access to archives not often seen as top secret, yet held invaluable information critical to Allied operations.
A captivating read for anyone curious about the often-hidden roles that contribute to major historical events.

I normally read fiction, especially mysteries, but when I was offered an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher, Harper Collins, something about the description caught my interest, so I thought I’d try it, and I’m very happy I did, my husband loves history so I had heard of some of the information in the book, but not in depth. To quote the author, the book is about “a group of seemingly unlikely people, though novices to spy craft, created new ways of doing intelligence that won a war, revolutionized spycraft, and changed the world.” When I think of spies I think of James Bond, here we’re introduced to librarians and researchers who can tell you the details of a city the U.S. wants to invade through telephone books, trade manuals and local newspapers so the military isn’t going in blind. The details described to give a spy a successful background story while in a foreign country were so interesting and not something I’d given much thought to. I’ve already recommended the book to my husband and his group of history loving friends, it’s well written, interesting and the ideas discussed are as pertinent to today as they were during WWII.

A fascinating account of the OSS agents during WWII who were recruited from academia to fight the Nazis. (Ordinary people doing extraordinary things!) A little-known fact is that during WWII, history and literature professors were recruited and made excellent spies. (Who'd a thought?) Graham’s a historian and professor, so it's no surprise that the book is impeccably researched. For bibliophiles and WWII buffs alike.

This was a fascinating topic to explore. When I think about WWII books, I think of subject matter like Nazis, weapons, troop movements, etc. But librarians and professors turned into spies? This was a new one for me, and I enjoyed it!