NATIONAL BESTSELLER NPR Best Book of 2017 “Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.” — The New York Times Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II. In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life. Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.
Amy Butler Greenfield is an award-winning historian and novelist who aims to shed light on this female pioneer of the STEM community.
“Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series, The World at the End of the War,” January-February 2002, NSA, approved for ... Crackdown: Elizebeth Smith Friedman's code breaking upheld the law,” Investor's Business Daily, May 19, 2005.
Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned ...
They'd just come from New York, a trip of about a hundred miles. One of the travelers, an older man, had driven his Roadster conservatively. He still had about 50 miles of range left in his battery.
Decode the story of Elizebeth Friedman, the cryptologist who took down gangsters and Nazi spies In this picture book biography, young readers will learn all about Elizebeth Friedman (1892–1980), a brilliant American code breaker who ...
Friedman can prove that this is so by this cock - eyed cypher invented by Doctor C. Doubleday - Doran subsequently rejected the book , but Cunningham found a publisher for it in California . Like other Baconians who were the first to ...
Drawing on a wealth of family diaries, photographs, letters and other papers, as well as on archival research and interviews on two continents, this “brilliantly rendered biography” documents the pivotal role of the Murphys in the story ...
Wendell Berry? Wendell Berry is a crank. There's no mainstream constituency in American life for smaller and softer. The Hummers won't evaporate into metallic mists, and we don't have another hundred million years for Mother Nature to ...
Edited by H. Bradford Westerfield . New Haven , Conn .: Yale University Press , 1995 . Jones , Benjamin F. “ Freeing France : The Allies , the Resistance , and the Jedburghs . ” Master's thesis , University of Kansas , 2008 .
The Girl Explorers is an inspiring examination of forgotten women from history, perfect for fans of bestselling narrative history books like The Radium Girls, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, and Rise of the Rocket Girls.