Saturday, April 24, 2021

Book Review: "A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II" by Sonia Purnell

 If you are here, you know that I read a lot of history books. But the amazing woman who are story focuses on today is someone who I hadn't heard of in any book... I actually heard of her from the classic show, Drunk History. This whole video is full of badass women but Virginia's section starts at 5 minutes, 22 seconds.

Virginia Hall was a woman born to an upwardly mobile Baltimore family. Her mom had all of her hopes pinned on Virginia for a wealthy husband to help the families upward social trajectory. Virginia was like....nah. She wanted to see the world and have experiences so she got jobs at US embassies in Europe and in the Near East (like Turkey. Is the Near East a thing people actually say?) Anyway, she busted her ass for almost no money and no respect but liked being in Europe, A hunting accident (literally shot herself in the foot) and a terrible case of gangrene left her with an amputated leg and fake leg named Cuthbert. (Though she was super guarded about her leg - it makes sense because she was fighting a lot of sexism throughout her life and why would you also add on abelism to that mix). 

Through much persistence, some good luck and the desperation that comes in war time she finally was able to get the British to drop her into France to work with The Resistance. Very quickly she made herself indispensable, working to build a network of people who were reliable and trustworthy so when agents were dropped into France they could be the most effective possible. Then the problem became that the agents who dropped into France spent a lot of time chasing women and drinking - it also didn't help that a lot of times that in the rush to get people in the field they didn't get as much training as they should have. And then it doesn't help that her handlers in London did a lot of micromanaging and sending other people with no experience to be her boss even though she was the only reason any of the resistance was having any success.

Her time in France was marked by close calls, amazing jailbreaks, loss, intrigue and everything else that you could think of. This book is amazing and exciting and celebrates a woman who went out of her way to stay out of the spotlight and under the radar. And because of that and, frankly, because she was a woman in a man's world, she never got the respect, title or paycheck that she deserved. So all hail Virginia Hall - a bad bitch who deserves to have at least 100 primary schools, a cool cocktail and several parks in France and Baltimore named after her. Let's make it happen!


 


Monday, April 12, 2021

What I've been reading...

 Version Control by Dexter Palmer. A couple (5?) years ago I was able to meet a blogging friend IRL while she was working at a bookstore in a town that I was visiting. For a book about time travel (which I love) the time travel came into this book really late into the book. I liked it, I just was surprised how long it took to get to (what it felt to me) the point.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatalov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar.  This book should be the least surprising book to show up on this blog ever. Oh, a book about an unexplained incident in post-WWII Russia with mysterious deaths? Yeah duh. I really liked this book, it felt well researched and full of these hikers humanities. What was great was that literally as I was reading this book there was breaking news about what might have caused the hikers deaths'. Interestingly enough, the theory that is breaking is a different theory than this book offers up. No "for sure" answers!

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg. I really wanted to adore this book because it seemed to hit a lot of my interests. I was disappointed in the fact that it didn't really hit for me. I think that the problem was that it tried to cover a lot of topics in a shortish book. Maybe it needed to be two separate books and then we would have been in business.