For February's book club, we'll be reading Elyse Graham's Book and Dagger.
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.
Elyse Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, a flagship university in the SUNY system. She holds degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT, and has learned how scholars whisper, scheme, launder information, and guard secrets. She is the author of three academic books: You Talkin’ to Me? (Oxford University Press), A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet (Stanford University Press), and The Republic of Games (McGill-Queens University Press).
Book and Dagger will be 25% off through February! Join us at the shop on February at 5pm for beer, wine, snacks, and book discussion.
Also check out other Arts events in Raleigh, Literary Art events in Raleigh, Workshops in Raleigh.
