Wise Gals

April 1, 2022

After meeting 99-year-old Stella Levi at her Greenwich Village apartment to discuss the Juderia, the 500-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Rhodes where she lived until Germans deported the entire community to Auschwitz, the JQ Wingate Prize-winning Frank ended up spending One Hundred Saturdays visiting Levi to discuss her community and her resilience in the face of the Holocaust (125,000-copy first printing). Among the youngest survivors of Auschwitz still alive, 83-year-old Friedman, a retired therapist who actively campaigns against antisemitism, recounts her Holocaust experiences and the unerring instinct for survival that kept her alive in The Daughter of Auschwitz. In Bridge to the Sun, the New York Times best-selling Henderson (Sons and Soldiers) lays bare the plight of Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater even as their families back home faced racial hatred and imprisonment in concentration camps. Directly after World War II, four tough-minded Wise Gals--Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier--were instrumental in forging the CIA, and the New York Times best-selling Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) finally tells their story. Author of theNew York Times best-selling, multi-best-booked Agent Sonya, Macintyre relies on declassified archives, private papers, and previously unseen photos to introduce readers to the Prisoners of the Castle, that is, Colditz Castle, the high-security POW camp run by the Wehrmacht during World War II and, says Macintyre, organized according to its own officer-class structure. In Black Snow, Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott (Target Tokyo) chronicles the March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo by nearly 300 U.S. B-29s, which left 16 square miles in ruins and 100,000 residents dead.

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June 27, 2022
Bestseller Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) profiles a quintet of pioneering female intelligence agents in this entertaining history. Drawing on diaries, scrapbooks, memos, letters, and recently declassified documents, Holt tracks Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, Elizabeth Sudmeier, and Jane Burrell from their WWII service and recruitment by the newly formed CIA through the early decades of the Cold War. Based in Munich, language expert Hutchison built a network of Ukrainian spies to try to penetrate Soviet intelligence; Sudmeier, who grew up on a reservation in South Dakota and “could pass for multiple ethnicities,” gathered information on Soviet influence in the Middle East; Hawkins, a divorced mom with three children, stayed stateside, where she helped design and implement new covert communications systems. Throughout, Holt highlights the sexism and misogyny these women endured (their efforts to organize for equal pay and recognition was derisively nicknamed the “Petticoat Panel”), weaves in intriguing details about microdot cameras and other spy tools, and draws colorful sketches of people and events including “Wild Bill” Donovan and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Though the story’s multiple threads get unwieldy at times, this is a revealing and vibrant look at the critical contributions women have made to the CIA. Photos.

July 1, 2022
Holt, author of the big hit, Rise of the Rocket Girls (2016), returns with another intriguing collective history of an overlooked group of women. Setting her sights here on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Holt embarks on an international journey to tell the stories of five women, the "wise gals" of the title, who built substantial careers in often unheralded service to the U.S. government. Relying on copious research, the author builds five individual biographies, weaving them into a larger story of intelligent, capable women who were alternately admired and ignored by their superiors in the period from WWII through the early 1970s. Their attempts to tackle the sexism of their profession were largely unsuccessful and deeply frustrating, especially in light of their personal sacrifices. With so many interesting individuals to learn about, the many names and places Holt includes can feel overwhelming, but her dedication to making her five main characters stand out and come fully to life is to be lauded. With a rich, always relevant subject, Holt's latest is a good choice for book groups.

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August 1, 2022
The hidden lives of pathbreaking women. Drawing on considerable archival material--diaries, letters, interviews, reports, memos, scrapbooks, and photographs--cultural historian Holt, author of Rise of the Rocket Girls and The Queens of Animation, creates a vivid group biography of five strong-willed women who held significant positions in the early years of the CIA: Adelaide Hawkins, a divorced mother of three; Mary Hutchison, married to a CIA staff officer; Eloise Page, admiringly known as the "Iron Butterfly"; Elizabeth Sudmeier, who had begun her career as secretary to Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan; and Jane Burrell, "the model of a tough, successful CIA officer" whose short-lived career ended in a plane crash in 1948. The women had joined the agency during World War II, when it was known as the Office of Strategic Services. Led by Donovan, it served as the source of vital military intelligence. After the war, President Harry Truman quashed Donovan's vision of a global web of intelligence-gathering agents, but as the threat of communism grew, Truman reinstated the agency as the Central Intelligence Group. With expanded powers, in 1947, it evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency. Holt reveals the frustration these women felt surrounded by misogynist "male, pale, and Yale" co-workers who were paid more, promoted to higher positions, and allowed privileges--to marry a non-American, for example--denied to women. In the 1950s, Allen Dulles, the new CIA director, set up a panel to address women's concerns, but the detailed report by what some derisively called the "Petticoat Panel" was ignored. The author traces each woman's challenging career, which involved recruiting and training foreign agents, designing a secure system for their communications, handling spies, engaging in counterintelligence, and heading operations around the world--Baghdad, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, and Rome--as the CIA's focus shifted from containing communism to monitoring nuclear weaponry to tracing terrorists. She makes a strong case for recognizing their talents and sacrifices: Each lived "a life of necessary duplicity." Well-researched profiles in courage.

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