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The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

12/19/2019

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January 16, 2019

Discussion led by Joel Wolk

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NPR Best Book of 2017
“Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.” — The New York Times
Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.
In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told.
In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.
Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32025298-the-woman-who-smashed-codes

https://www.bookculture.com/blog/2017/11/12/saras-review-woman-who-smashed-codes-jason-fagone
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Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie. In “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” Jason Fagone recounts the stranger-than-fiction story of how the 23-year-old Smith was hired in 1916, along with other scholars, by an eccentric tycoon who wanted to find secret messages in the work of Shakespeare. Those messages didn’t exist, but within a year Smith was recruited into a wartime code-breaking project. (“American history is very strange,” Fagone told me.) Smith met and married the cryptologist William Friedman; helped break up smuggling rings during Prohibition; and spent World War II successfully decoding messages sent between Nazi spies, ruining the Germans’ operations in South America, among other triumphs. Below, Fagone talks about the long odds he faced in filling in the gaps in his subject’s life, the role sexism played in her career and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
After the Edward Snowden story broke in 2013, I started reading about the history of the N.S.A. Like a lot of Americans, I didn’t know a lot about it. While I was doing that, I stumbled across a web page about Elizebeth Smith Friedman at the library where she donated her personal papers — the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Va. It was really just a bare description of her life. She was a poet who taught herself to break codes; she caught gangsters during Prohibition; and, oh yeah, she was married to a godfather of the N.S.A. And I thought, that’s unusual: Married codebreakers. I saw there was an old biography of William from the ’70s, but no books about Elizebeth.
She left 22 boxes of her files. It’s a wonderful archive. You can read her letters from a hundred years ago, her college diary, her original poems, her original code work, letters that she wrote to her kids in code. She and William taught their daughter how to use cipher, and she would write them cipher letters from summer camp.
When I finished going through the boxes, I realized there was this gap where World War II is supposed to be. And it kind of screamed out, because she had documented the rest of her life so meticulously. I was pretty sure the records existed somewhere, but I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find them. I talked to a historian who had worked on William, and she told me, “Sometimes it’s not that the N.S.A. is evil and trying to keep this stuff from you; sometimes it’s just that they don’t know where it is.” The National Archives is like the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” You can spend months looking for something in there.




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The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss

11/25/2019

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February 20, 2020

Read by Barbara Viniar
Nashville, August 1920
Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state–Tennessee–is needed for women’s voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians, clergy, corporations, and racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the nation’s moral collapse. And in one hot summer, they all converge for a confrontation, replete with booze and blackmail, betrayal and courage. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman’s Hour is the gripping story of how America’s women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/books/review/womans-hour-elaine-weiss.html

​https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168384


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The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss

11/25/2019

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February 20, 2020

Read by Barbara Viniar
Nashville, August 1920:  Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state--Tennessee--is needed for women's voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians, clergy, corporations, and racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the "Antis"--women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the nation's moral collapse. And in one hot summer, they all converge for a confrontation, replete with booze and blackmail, betrayal and courage. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman's Hour is the gripping story of how America's women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/the-imperfect-unfinished-work-of-womens-suffrage

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/books/review/womans-hour-elaine-weiss.html
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Energy: A Human History

11/22/2019

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March 19, 2020

Read by Alan Metzger
Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time - wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production, from animal and water power to the steam engine, from internal combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming and a population hurtling toward 10 billion by 2100.
Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes' singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TagDqxdyA9A

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/review/energy-richard-rhodes.html


​http://chesterenergyandpolicy.com/2018/10/10/energy-a-human-history/
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The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America: Margaret O'Mara:

9/23/2019

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December 21, 2019

Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects.

Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not. 

The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.


https://www.amazon.com/Code-Silicon-Valley-Remaking-America/dp/0399562184

https://www.paloaltojcc.org/Events/the-code-silicon-valley-and-the-remaking-of-america
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https://www.amazon.com/Code-Silicon-Valley-Remaking-America/dp/0399562184
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A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman

7/30/2019

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 November 21, 2019
Discussion led by Stan Applebaum
The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.”

These are the years when the Black Death struck in the great plague of 1348-50, killing more than a third of the entire population between India and Iceland, and returned four times during the rest of the century... when freebooting companies of brigands terrorized Europe with impunity... when a "hundred years' war" seemed to have no beginning and no end, and, defying the belligerents' own efforts to end it, acquired a life of its own, "an epic of brutality and bravery checkered by disgrace"... when chivalry, the ideal that had formed and nurtured the nobility, was crumbling under the impact of new weapons, new tactics, and knightly follies...

An excellent commentary on Barbara Tuchman as an historian.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/a-distant-mirror-by-barbara-w-tuchman/

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A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War bySonia Pernell

7/22/2019

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October 17, 2019

Discussion led by Alan Rubin
“Excellent…This book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down.” -- The New York Times Book Review

"A compelling biography of a masterful spy, and a reminder of what can be done with a few brave people -- and a little resistance." - NPR

The never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine


In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." 

The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and--despite her prosthetic leg--helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it. 

Virginia established vast spy networks throughout France, called weapons and explosives down from the skies, and became a linchpin for the Resistance. Even as her face covered wanted posters and a bounty was placed on her head, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped through a death-defying hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown. But she plunged back in, adamant that she had more lives to save, and led a victorious guerrilla campaign, liberating swathes of France from the Nazis after D-Day.

Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall--an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war.


https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/711356336/a-woman-of-no-importance-finally-gets-her-due

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-woman-of-no-importance-the-untold-story-of-wwii-s-most-dangerous-spy-virginia-hall-1.3858641

​
https://variety.com/2017/film/news/daisy-ridley-a-woman-of-no-importance-paramount-1201968755/

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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

5/24/2019

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September 19, 2019

Led by George Stassi

 We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited?

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire-daniel-immerwahr.html


Video:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire-daniel-immerwahr.html

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Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts

5/22/2019

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July 18, 2019

Discussion led by Stacy Wallach

“Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” --Wall Street Journal

In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood--by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War. 


In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood--by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War. 

Video:

 https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=tightropetb&p=winston+churchill+walking+with+destiny&type=Y137_F13_163989_050719

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/books/review/andrew-roberts-churchill-winston-biography.html

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/29/churchill-walking-with-destiny-andrew-roberts-review



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Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution by Simon Schama

5/16/2019

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June 20, 2019

Discussion led by Kate Kidd
Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.
 

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5361103


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Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgvbtJOCiWc


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