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A review by pileofmonsters
Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham
adventurous
informative
mysterious
fast-paced
4.0
It felt oddly timely to read this, especially towards the learning about the impacts this knowledge initiative in the OSS had on kickstarting America's intelligence strategies, given recent (early 2025) goings on.
I bought it because I'm interested in knowledge management. It would have been really cool to see the actual flow of knowledge throughout the war, if that was the thread that brought you through the narrative of the war. You could have taken any one of these stories and written a whole book about information analysis or picked a few to provide an intimate walkthrough of the many ways information can be manipulated. Instead, it was more like a summary of examples across the war, but I still appreciated that. I learned a lot of stuff that I had never been taught before, not even peripherally.
I guess a book like this is a bit limited to resourcing because perhaps women didn't write enough about their experiences in the war. I wish any one of those lady librarians wrote a memoir as descriptive as the men's. I would have loved more detail on their adventures too, but I guess we have what we have available to us, which is tons of shit about a racist anthropologist.
Despite that it gets 4/5 stars for being interesting and fun to read, if not a little disjointed at times, with an overarching goal to promote the usefulness of knowledge and humanities.
I bought it because I'm interested in knowledge management. It would have been really cool to see the actual flow of knowledge throughout the war, if that was the thread that brought you through the narrative of the war. You could have taken any one of these stories and written a whole book about information analysis or picked a few to provide an intimate walkthrough of the many ways information can be manipulated. Instead, it was more like a summary of examples across the war, but I still appreciated that. I learned a lot of stuff that I had never been taught before, not even peripherally.
I guess a book like this is a bit limited to resourcing because perhaps women didn't write enough about their experiences in the war. I wish any one of those lady librarians wrote a memoir as descriptive as the men's. I would have loved more detail on their adventures too, but I guess we have what we have available to us, which is tons of shit about a racist anthropologist.
Despite that it gets 4/5 stars for being interesting and fun to read, if not a little disjointed at times, with an overarching goal to promote the usefulness of knowledge and humanities.