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NonfictionEuropean History

Love in the Blitz

Review by Anna Christensen

In the English summer of 1939, Eileen Alexander’s life seemed sun-dappled. A recent graduate of the University of Cambridge and the only daughter in an upper-class Jewish family with powerful political connections, she was beloved in her circle of brilliant friends and embarking on a promising future. Even a hospital stay after being flung from a car could not blight her charmed life; she began a correspondence with the guilt-stricken driver, which quickly blossomed into flirtation, and then romance. As the course of her life shifted abruptly and against her will that year, like the lives of so many at the onset of World War II, Alexander responded with unflappable humor and irrepressible intellect, both of which shine through in Love in the Blitz, a collection of her letters to her paramour and eventual husband.

Alexander’s letters were purchased by chance in an eBay auction, and they detail not only her romance with their recipient but countless other moments of humanity and hopefulness in the face of harrowing circumstances. England was under siege, and Alexander illustrates some of the worst of it: air raid warnings in the night, the stress of being packed with family into a small shelter, the heartache of lost friends and classmates. That Alexander’s sense of humor remained so resolutely intact throughout only serves to highlight the occasional glimpse of sadness or weariness, and you admire her all the more for it.

Alexander’s unassailable wit makes her an accessible narrator, someone in whom we see pieces of our friends, our sisters and, we hope, ourselves. She flirts salaciously with her lover, making references to their “mollocking,” gossips cheerfully and good-naturedly about their friends and offers hysterical observations at every turn. For a book of war correspondence, it’s peculiar to note that it’s a laugh-out-loud sort of work, but Alexander’s candor makes her wartime experience real to us. When she shows up for work only to find her workplace bombed, we feel the impact of that moment as though we’re standing next to her. When she stops in her tracks in one letter to wonder if she will ever forget the things she has seen, we pause with her.

After reading Love in the Blitz, events on the 20th-century world stage no longer seem so removed from our own age. We can only hope to conduct ourselves as Alexander did: with tenacity, optimism, tenderness and a perfect zinger for everything.

In the English summer of 1939, Eileen Alexander’s life seemed sun-dappled. A recent graduate of the University of Cambridge and the only daughter in an upper-class Jewish family with powerful political connections, she was beloved in her circle of brilliant friends and embarking on a…

NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Who Ate the First Oyster?

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

There have been so many “firsts” throughout human history that it would be impossible to calculate them all. But what if you took a few very important ones and deconstructed their evolution—how, when, where and why they happened, their outcome and their effect on humankind?

That’s exactly what Cody Cassidy (co-author of And Then You’re Dead) does in his intriguing new book, Who Ate the First Oyster? The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History. Delving deep into our primordial past, Cassidy profiles “seventeen ancient individuals who lived before or without writing” whom he deems responsible for humankind’s greatest “firsts.” These range from “Who Invented Inventions?” and “Who Discovered Fire?” to “Who Discovered Soap?” and “Who First Rode the Horse?”

Using these individuals as examples, Cassidy describes in detail what it was like to live in premodern times, along with contemporary touchstones for how these firsts have shaped who we are today. He gathers expert data to offer opinions from a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology and engineering, providing a well-rounded vision of each subject. Some results are rather surprising, such as the scholarly speculation that geniuses were just as common throughout ancient history (perhaps even more so), and the finding that head surgery was performed over 7,000 years ago with a stone tool (not a sterilized scalpel). He also discusses the things that universally define us as “human,” such as body decoration and the fact that the wheel and axle were independently invented by parents in both Europe and the Americas to make a toy.

Ultimately, Cassidy presents the impact of new technology on our current knowledge base. “With modern tools,” he writes, “scholars can now engage in more educated speculation about the greatest people, moments, and firsts of ancient history than ever before.” Who Ate the First Oyster? is a fascinating dive into the history of us all.

There have been so many “firsts” throughout human history that it would be impossible to calculate them all. But what if you took a few very important ones and deconstructed their evolution—how, when, where and why they happened, their outcome and their effect on humankind?

…
NonfictionBlack History

Wandering in Strange Lands

Review by Anne Bartlett

When Morgan Jerkins traveled the United States in search of her roots, she didn’t just look up the official records, useful as they sometimes were. She talked to relatives and knowledgeable strangers to explore what she calls the “whisper” stories: the ones African Americans and Native Americans quietly pass on through generations, because they are afraid to speak them too loudly.

In the sensitive, insightful Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, Jerkins, an African American in her 20s raised mostly in New Jersey, recounts her journey to uncover the meaning of those stories for her own relatives, as well as for the millions of others who moved north during the Great Migration. Seemingly unimportant traditions like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day and half-serious references to “roots” hexes turn out to be important clues to the culture of kidnapped Africans in Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana.

Jerkins finds the hard truths of racism in her research: a great-grandfather who fled a lynching threat; Gullah landowners forced off their property by whites; relatives who “passed” as white and cut family ties. But she also struggles emotionally with the discovery that her background is more diverse than she had understood. Among her ancestors are whites, free Creole people of color who owned slaves, and, possibly, Native Americans.

After her illuminating visits to Louisiana, Oklahoma and the Georgia-South Carolina low country, Jerkins ends in Los Angeles, where she spent part of her childhood. California, she says, was the last Promised Land for black people, but it turned out to be as disappointing as everywhere else. Now many African Americans are leaving in a reverse migration to the South. 

As Jerkins finishes her moving chronicle, she says she is “exhausted” by the constant racial violence she finds, most recently in the massacres in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, where a high proportion of the victims were people of color. One way forward, she writes, is for black people to “regain their narrative and contextualize the shame.” The answer, Jerkins says, is not flight but true community informed by deep knowledge of the past.

When Morgan Jerkins traveled the United States in search of her roots, she didn’t just look up the official records, useful as they sometimes were. She talked to relatives and knowledgeable strangers to explore what she calls the “whisper” stories: the ones African Americans and…

NonfictionLatin American HistoryHistory

Coffeeland

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

The term “coffeeland” could easily describe the United States today. Long part of daily life and culture, coffee has evolved from an inexpensive, plain cup of joe to a dizzying array of menu choices. But in this fascinating history, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, Augustine Sedgewick digs deeper to explore the little-known saga of James Hill, an Englishman who founded a coffee dynasty in El Salvador, where he arrived in 1889 at age 19. Not only did Hill change his own family’s fortunes, he transformed his adopted country into a coffee monoculture. By the second half of the 20th century, coffee made up more than 90% of El Salvador’s exports, bringing wealth to some and poverty to others.

Sedgewick sets Hill’s story against the backdrop of the history of the coffee business, which has its roots in the mid-1500s in Constantinople. By the mid-1650s, the coffee craze had taken England by storm. The coffeehouse, and the replacement of ale by coffee as people’s daily drink, has been linked to societal transformation and innovation. But it was textiles, not coffee, that originally brought Hill to Central America. Once there, he met and married Lola Bernal, whose dowry included coffee plantations. (Today, the company he founded continues as J. Hill and Company.)

Some of the most interesting sections of Sedgewick’s narrative trace Hill’s efforts to make his coffee the best, becoming an eager student of all aspects of coffee, from production to marketing. Sedgewick also is adept at incorporating Hill’s enterprise into the fabric of major historical events that impacted the world coffee market, such as the Great Depression. Sedgewick brings his narrative to a close with a discussion of the role of coffee today, arguing that coffee has replaced sugar as the commodity that most often drives discussion about the world economy and issues of economic justice.

Impeccably researched, with an extensive bibliography, source notes and an index, Coffeeland is a rich and immensely readable journey into an aspect of 21st-century life worth learning more about.

The term “coffeeland” could easily describe the United States today. Long part of daily life and culture, coffee has evolved from an inexpensive, plain cup of joe to a dizzying array of menu choices. But in this fascinating history, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and…

NonfictionHistory

Heaven and Hell

Review by Deborah Mason

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 72% of Americans believe in heaven, a place where “good people are eternally rewarded.” A sizable majority (58%) also believes in hell, the place “where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.” These rates are even higher among Christians. If these beliefs truly guide the actions of their adherents, then it’s arguable that heaven and hell are the two most influential pieces of real estate in American society. It was therefore fascinating to learn from Bart D. Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife that this concept of the afterlife is nowhere to be found in the Bible. 

Ehrman’s subtitle is a bit misleading, since it’s not an actual history of these places. He is not rewriting Paradise Lost. Instead, he details the development of our ideas about heaven and hell. Starting with Mesopotamia, Ehrman carefully traces how ancient ideas of death as an “eternal sleep” developed into our current conception of death as a place of retribution or reward. Ehrman argues that, far from being set in stone, our views of heaven and hell have evolved in response to crises confronting the societies that ultimately created modern Christianity. Our view of the afterlife, it turns out, owes more to Greek mythology, Plato and Greek theologians of the first millennium than it does to the Old Testament or even Jesus’ words and actions. 

This is a complex history, and it could easily become confusing or, worse, boring. But Ehrman has avoided both pitfalls. As the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ehrman has the expertise necessary to make this difficult subject comprehensible. Even better, his witty, self-deprecatory style makes Heaven and Hell an enjoyable read. Most importantly, this is an optimistic book. Professor Ehrman invites us to revisit a “truth” that most of us hold almost instinctively and, in the process, to lose the fear of the afterlife that can prevent us from fully living our present lives.

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 72% of Americans believe in heaven, a place where “good people are eternally rewarded.” A sizable majority (58%) also believes in hell, the place “where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are…

NonfictionWomen's HistoryBiography

Free Thinker

Review by Catherine Hollis

Helen Hamilton Gardener, née Alice Chenoweth, may be the most famous suffrage activist you’ve never heard of. Her eventful experiences took her from the Civil War, to life as a so-called “fallen woman,” to a name change and political work in support of women’s issues, culminating in the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1919. In Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, historian Kimberly A. Hamlin knits together the many strands of Gardener’s story into a compelling narrative about a woman who advocated tirelessly for the freedom to control her body, money and intellect.

A “fallen woman,” in 19th-century parlance, meant an unmarried woman who’d had any sexual experience whatsoever. Young Alice Chenoweth worked as a teacher, one of the few “respectable” professions open to single women in Cincinnati in the 1870s. She fell afoul of the sexual double standard when she entered into an affair with a married man who claimed to have left his wife. She lost her job because of the relationship; her partner, Charles Smart, did not. The situation prompted her to move to New York with Smart, change her name to Gardener and become a lifelong advocate for women’s independence.

As Helen Hamilton Gardener, she wrote books, gave lectures and became a champion for many women’s issues, including raising the age of consent and obtaining the vote. Gardener became a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, but within this movement, Gardener advocated for the vote to be obtained first by white women. This strategy was intended to gain the support of Southern states, but it cruelly denied an alliance with black women for the universal right to vote. 

With this biography, Hamlin has written a nuanced history of the suffrage movement through the life of a remarkable woman. Gardener wasn’t perfect, but this biography does an excellent job balancing her extraordinary achievements against her cultural blind spots. 

Helen Hamilton Gardener, née Alice Chenoweth, may be the most famous suffrage activist you’ve never heard of. Her eventful experiences took her from the Civil War, to life as a so-called “fallen woman,” to a name change and political work in support of women’s issues,…

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Fighting Words

Review by Roger Bishop

During the 1920s and ’30s, Americans who wanted to learn what was happening in other parts of the world depended on newspapers, magazines and books. In her beautifully crafted and engrossing Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars, Harvard historian Nancy F. Cott vividly portrays the important work and complicated lives of four prominent foreign correspondents during a time of monumental change. Bright and resourceful, they let Americans know what was happening in the devastating aftermath of World War I—in Europe as fascism was on the rise, in a deeply divided Middle East, in Russia when Stalin ruled and in China as revolution grew. They were astute observers and often better than diplomats in assessing what was going on.

Aspiring novelists Vincent Sheean and John Gunther were eager to get to Europe, where they hoped to find work as journalists to support themselves. Dorothy Thompson wanted to get to Europe, too, uncertain of how she would earn a living but proving to be a natural reporter. Rayna Raphaelson Prohme yearned to go to China, where she believed a historic transition, “the biggest struggle that is taking place in all the world,” was happening.

Sheean became best known for his Personal History, a bestselling account of his life during the 1920s. Gunther wrote the bestsellers Inside Europe and Inside U.S.A. but is best remembered for his Death Be Not Proud, a portrait of his son’s illness and death. Thompson’s reporting, including an interview with Hitler, was exceptional, and she became an influential newspaper and magazine columnist and radio commentator. Prohme’s path was quite different from the others but certainly fascinating.

This wonderfully readable narrative will hold your attention from beginning to end and features cameos by journalist Louise Bryant (the widow of fellow journalist John Reed) and the prominent authors Rebecca West and Sinclair Lewis, who was Thompson’s husband when he received the Nobel Prize in literature.

During the 1920s and ’30s, Americans who wanted to learn what was happening in other parts of the world depended on newspapers, magazines and books. In her beautifully crafted and engrossing Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars,…

NonfictionWomen's HistorySocial Science

In Our Prime

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When feminist, scholar, media critic and author Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth, Where the Girls Are) writes, “So here we are, on our puppet strings,” she is addressing “women of a certain age”—and she means it not as a wail of surrender but as a call to arms. Her book In Our Prime: How Older Women Are Reinventing the Road Ahead will inflame the hearts of both those who participated in the feminist movement of the 1970s and those who cut their teeth on #MeToo.

This rallying cry hearkens back to a long history of gender and age discrimination, from the patriarchal laws of colonial America that denied women their property rights, to the suffragists’ long fight for the right to vote, to the “coiling together of ageism and misogyny [that] served as a powerful weapon against Hillary Clinton in 2016.” From such “turnstile moments” have come history’s inspiring activists: FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins; Dolores Huerta of the National Farm Workers Association; co-founder of Ms. magazine Gloria Steinem; the Gray Panthers’ founder Maggie Kuhn; and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now is the time, Douglas urges her aging contemporaries, to pass the feminist-activist torch to the next generation.

Thanks to the constant barrage of print, television and social media, ageism (or anti-aging) seems to be everywhere. It’s rampant across advertising campaigns, thriving in the largely unregulated cosmetics industry and inherent in Big Pharma marketing, where “age itself is a condition that needs treatment.” Without vigilance and action, Douglas warns, prejudicial attitudes can become government policies.

She pays special attention to current perspectives on the fate of Social Security. With statistical evidence always in hand, Douglas points out that women tend to outlive men while earning less over their lifetimes and so are more vulnerable to changes in this long-standing retirement benefit. The personal can become political: Keep an eye on your future, she advises her younger counterparts, and share your awareness with others. The collective consciousness-raising of the 1970s needs a comeback.

Inspiration can also come from celebrity “visibility revolts,” as when ageist stereotypes are demolished on screen in shows like “Grace and Frankie,” which follows in the footsteps of “The Golden Girls.” With humor and aplomb, Douglas makes a convincing case for how to end the war on older women and reinvent what aging can mean.

When feminist, scholar, media critic and author Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth, Where the Girls Are) writes, “So here we are, on our puppet strings,” she is addressing “women of a certain age”—and she means it not as a wail of surrender but as…
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Congress at War

Review by Roger Bishop

The 37th and 38th Congresses, who served from 1861 until 1865, were among the most important in American history. They passed legislation that kept the nation together during the Civil War, but they also broke ground on other extraordinary measures—such as Western homesteading, land-grant colleges and the Transcontinental Railroad, which transformed the U.S. socially and economically. In his compelling and vivid Congress at War, Fergus M. Bordewich delves deep into the difficult day-to-day politics that drove these achievements.

In focus are four key members of Congress. Three were Republicans: Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, both called Radicals, and Senator William Fessenden of Maine, who was more cautious. The fourth was Clement Vallandigham, a Democrat from Ohio with Southern sympathies.

Stevens, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, dealt with the daily expenses of the military, as well as critical war measures. Fessenden’s greatest contribution to the Union victory was his leadership of the Senate Finance Committee, where he raised the money to sustain the war through crisis after crisis. What’s more, his vote to acquit Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial may have decisively changed the course of history. Vallandigham was one of the great dissenters in our history, while Wade ably and effectively chaired the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Many congressmen insisted that they had the power to shape the course of the war. Some were even ahead of President Lincoln in such matters as the emancipation of slaves, enacting an incremental series of laws that helped abolitionism become public policy. One of their boldest and most controversial actions was the establishment of the aforementioned Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which, over four years, investigated almost every aspect of the war and pressured the president to move more decisively against slavery and to take more aggressive military action.

This recounting of a pivotal time in our history is superb and deserves a wide readership.

The 37th and 38th Congresses, who served from 1861 until 1865, were among the most important in American history. They passed legislation that kept the nation together during the Civil War, but they also broke ground on other extraordinary measures—such as Western homesteading, land-grant colleges…

NonfictionWomen's HistorySocial Science

Hood Feminism

Review by Carly Nations

Although there are more women CEOs today than there were at the beginning of the 1970s, complaints of workplace harassment and threats toward women who speak out have remained largely unchanged. But author and activist Mikki Kendall explains that the feminist movement has an even larger failure to contend with: the way that it has left behind women of color as white women grab more power. Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot critiques the dangers of this exclusionary brand of feminism and exhorts those who support changing it for the better.

Throughout the book, Kendall points toward political arenas that historically haven’t been tied to feminism, like food insecurity, gun violence and access to education—issues that largely affect communities of color. Kendall not only details the ways in which ignoring these issues has turned feminism into white feminism but also explains how these missteps have resulted in the failure of feminism as a whole. She convincingly demonstrates how this exclusionary behavior, intended to protect the interests of white women who “cling to the agency and selfhood they feel they have fought so hard to achieve,” in fact results in an outcome that threatens those interests: a strengthening of the patriarchy that actively works against the goal of equality.

Hood Feminism addresses a world that has abandoned marginalized people in favor of creating more opportunity for those who are already in power. For Kendall, the work of feminism is not the achievement of female success but rather the achievement of a larger ideal: genuine equality. If that is the goal, the work of feminism is far from over. 

In fact, with rising income inequality, surging gentrification and shrinking social services, the work of feminism has only just begun.

Although there are more women CEOs today than there were at the beginning of the 1970s, complaints of workplace harassment and threats toward women who speak out have remained largely unchanged. But author and activist Mikki Kendall explains that the feminist movement has an even…

NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Splendid and the Vile

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

When a body of historical literature is as vast as the one on Winston Churchill in World War II, it’s fair to ask whether the world needs yet another entry. But when the author is a master of popular history like Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz—the engrossing story of Churchill’s first year as prime minister—needs no additional justification.

Larson (Dead Wake) begins his account with Churchill’s assumption of power on May 10, 1940, on the eve of the British evacuation of Dunkirk, and continues for exactly one year. That highly consequential span saw, among other events, the fall of France, the London Blitz (Germany’s relentless aerial bombardment that killed nearly 45,000 Britons) and Churchill’s tactful but persistent courtship of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that culminated in the securing of material assistance vital to sustaining Britain’s war effort. It was also a year in which Churchill time and again displayed his unsurpassed gift for inspiring a beleaguered nation—through his oratory and through the sheer force of his personality—to persist through some of the darkest days of the war, when German bombs rained death nightly on Britain’s cities, and invasion seemed imminent.

But The Splendid and the Vile isn’t merely a story of war and diplomacy. Larson devotes considerable attention to daily life inside the Churchill household, including frequent weekend excursions at the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, where social gatherings often stretched into the early morning hours amid intensive war planning. Larson also humanizes the prime minister through stories of his teenage daughter, Mary, struggling to make the awkward transition into adulthood in the midst of war’s chaos, and his son Randolph, whose marriage was crumbling under the weight of a gambling addiction.

While Britain didn’t defeat Hitler in Churchill’s momentous first year, it unquestionably stared down annihilation and survived. Enlivened by Larson’s effective use of primary sources and, above all, by his vibrant storytelling, The Splendid and the Vile brings a fresh eye to a familiar story of courage, determination and hope.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile.

When a body of historical literature is as vast as the one on Winston Churchill in World War II, it’s fair to ask whether the world needs yet another entry. But when the author is a master of popular history like Erik Larson, The Splendid and the…

NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Seduction

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

We’ve all been seduced before. We’ve allowed politicians to lure us away from our reason to follow our passions for an issue or a candidate; we’ve let television commercials sing a siren song to us about our absolute need for a product—a car, a bottle of beer, a chicken sandwich—that will send us into ecstasy once we possess it. We’re surrounded by seduction narratives, and Clement Knox’s Seduction: A History from the Enlightenment to the Present provides an alluring and breathtaking history of enticement in the modern age.

A painstakingly close reader of literary texts, Knox teases out various seduction narratives in novels from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa—the original modern seduction narratives—to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Neil Strauss’ The Game. Enthralled by these and other texts and cultural artefacts, Knox draws the contours of two forms of seduction narratives that have evolved and now coexist in our culture. He calls the classic seduction narrative the “Villainous” kind, because the seducer uses guile or deception to overcome the resistance of their target. Such narratives play on the psychological vulnerability of the target so that the seducer can lead the target away from what the target really prefers or wants. The other narrative focuses on the power of reason and an individual’s ability to act in their own interest in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

These seduction narratives are captivating, and most of us are characters in one or the other in our own lives. Knox’s fascinating book illustrates the magnetism of these narratives as they draw us into their orbits and as we use them to offer explanations of individual and social behavior.

We’ve all been seduced before. We’ve allowed politicians to lure us away from our reason to follow our passions for an issue or a candidate; we’ve let television commercials sing a siren song to us about our absolute need for a product—a car, a bottle…

NonfictionMilitary HistoryHistory

A Game of Birds and Wolves

Review by Deborah Mason

Games can be deadly serious—ask any soccer parent—but we generally see them as child’s play. It is therefore surprising that in war, where the stakes are the absolute highest, games play an essential role. War games allow armies to test officers’ strategies and decision-making in a risk-free environment, and lessons learned on the game board are frequently transferred to the battlefield. One man who thoroughly grasped this idea was Captain Gilbert Roberts, who, along with his team of eight officers from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, popularly known as the Wrens), devised a game that arguably changed the course of World War II. In A Game of Birds and Wolves, Simon Parkin tells this remarkable and little-known story.

In 1941, Great Britain was in danger of being starved of food and supplies by U-boat attacks. Roberts realized that, by simulating the conditions of war as closely as possible on an auditorium-sized game board, he could devise countermeasures to the tactics used by U-boat captains. He could also train submarine hunters without the risk of failure. Ultimately, the men who played the game used their knowledge to defeat the U-boat fleet in the decisive Battle of Birds and Wolves. Without the Wrens, who not only ran the games but also helped design new scenarios and countermeasures, none of this would have happened.

Like a well-designed game, A Game of Birds and Wolves is fun, informative and intense. Parkin naturally focuses much of his attention on Roberts, whose story of triumph over adversity and skepticism is a great read. But the book really shines when Parkin reclaims the history of the Wrens. Although women played a vital role in the war, their work was often undervalued, and much of this history was lost or destroyed. The Wrens, working with Roberts, were instrumental to an Allied victory, but few among us know what we owe to them. 

Parkin’s respect and affection for these women is apparent on every page, and his extensive research and excellent storytelling go a long way toward paying that debt.

Games can be deadly serious—ask any soccer parent—but we generally see them as child’s play. It is therefore surprising that in war, where the stakes are the absolute highest, games play an essential role. War games allow armies to test officers’ strategies and decision-making in…

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