What We're Reading
The Woman Who Smashed Codes
By: Jason Fagone
Recommended by: Vicky Rogers
This is a true story based on the life of Elizebeth Smith, a young Quaker schoolteacher and poetry scholar who
played an integral role in our nation's history-from the Great War to the Cold War. The author traces Elizebeth's developing career through World War I, Prohibition, and the struggle against fascism. She helped catch gangsters and smugglers, exposed a Nazi spy ring in South America, and fought a clandestine battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German operatives to conceal their communications. And through it all, she served as muse to her husband, a master of puzzles, who astonished friends and foes alike. Inside an army vault in Washington, he worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma-and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.
Rich in detail,
The Woman Who Smashed Codes
pays tribute to an unsung hero whose story belongs alongside those of other great female technologists, like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, and whose oft-hidden contributions altered the course of the century.
|
