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

This month, Alice moderated a discussion and interviewed Elyse Graham, author of Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, at the Darien Community Association in Darien, CT. One of the scholars in the book, Adele Kibre, is also featured here on the Remarkable Women Stories blog.

If you are a fan of history, historical fiction or fiction -- which covers just about everyone -- this book is a thriller, a historical account and a character driven novel rolled into one. Written in a novelistic style, the book uncovers a little-known part of World War II in which librarians, scholars and academics were recruited by the Library of Congress to be an elite intelligence unit in Europe.
Or to put it another way, Book and Dagger introduces us to the “least glamorous people for the world’s most glamorous profession”. The result is a story that qualifies as “history’s greatest spy thriller”.