Page Turners: How Academics Played Key Roles in the Defeat of Fascism

A new book describes the largely forgotten roles of scholars in the victories of World War II—and how the Nazis' racist fanaticism doomed Germany

Elyse Graham, a historian and professor at Stony Brook University in New York, has written an entertaining and sometimes cagey book about highly educated British and Americans who joined the war against the Nazis in World War II.

Graham’s Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became The Unlikely Spies of World War II, is misleading in the sense that it’s much more than what the title suggests. Her canvas is, in fact, far broader. To be sure, Book and Dagger is an encyclopedic landscape of Allied intelligence operations in Europe, from disinformation and sabotage campaigns to counterintelligence techniques and every form of trickery that undergirded the ultimate victory over the Axis powers in the war. But beyond that, in her first book for a non-academic audience, the author compares the fight against fascism then to the challenges America faces now.