Subtitled The True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, Jason Fagone's book delivers on that promise, bringing one woman's deliberately erased accomplishments back into the limelight … After Elizebeth's surreal beginnings, Fagone keeps the focus largely on her work, and on a marriage strained by government pressure — a codebreaking team forbidden to talk to each other about what they were doing. ‘A competent codebreaker was suddenly a person of the highest military value,’ Fagone writes. Their skill made them threats; they were treated accordingly, and this intelligence-gathering operation begins to feel more John Le Carré than James Bond … Bursting with details in everything from dinner parties to spy rings, Fagone's book offers the story of a fascinating woman in perilous times, and asks some uneasy questions about the present.
...a fascinating combination of love story, spy novel and war tale, all of it true … Fagone tells Elizebeth’s tale briskly over 340-or-so pages, seamlessly mixing her efforts with little side stories showing the fruit her labor bore … The Woman Who Smashed Codes is short but rarely simple, as the subject matter may require: There’s nothing easy about breaking Enigmas, the legendary German device. But it’s a story that anyone with interest in the time period has to read, a key piece of the puzzle about America’s war effort.
Fagone’s book details Elizebeth’s long and rollicking career — one where she lays the foundation of U.S. codebreaking and the intelligence community as we know it — and it reads like some wild cross between a fairy tale and a gripping detective thriller … Fagone is a capable guide to this kaleidoscope of historical material, as comfortable with vivid character description as he is with elegant explanations of technical cipher-untangling … The Woman Who Smashed Codes is winning for so many reasons: Readers will delight in the sheer staggering amount of historical detail Fagone packs into the book; they’ll vicariously feel Elizebeth’s cerebral thrill at finally cracking a code; they’ll cheer her remarkable work as a pioneering codebreaker who happens to be a woman.
After stumbling upon 22 boxes of Smith Friedman’s personal files at the George C. Marshall library in West Virginia, writer Jason Fagone spent three years researching her life. The resulting work of literary nonfiction, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, is a triumph ...an account of one woman’s remarkable life during a remarkable historical period, but it’s also a simple love story ...literally transporting. It takes you to a pre-NSA world before mass intelligence, when the FBI was taking down Al Capone, and Treasury officials and federal agents would turn up on the doorstep of Mrs. Friedman — as she was universally known to the government spooks — to solve their puzzles ...full of characters who merit entire biographies in their own right... Fagone excels in describing those who powered the war effort but received scarce glory.
Fagone portrays Friedman as a premier American codebreaker, on a par with her husband, the better known (at least in the world of secret messages) William Friedman ...depicts her not only as a cryptological genius but also as a loving wife, the intellectual equal of William, but emotionally sturdier ... Fagone includes samples of such encrypted messages and explains basic methods for 'breaking' or 'cracking' them ... Fagone notes that William was paid as a signal corps lieutenant and Elizebeth as a civilian, but he doesn’t remark much on the gender disparity, a topic Mundy treats in great detail ...brings a tone of romantic espionage to his coverage of Elizebeth’s life and career.
Readers who tackle the daily Cryptoquip in this paper’s Everyday section will enjoy reading magazine journalist Jason Fagone’s The Woman Who Smashed Codes … Elizebeth Friedman managed to stay a step ahead of Germany’s cryptologists. Although author Fagone tries to keep his prose simple, his subject sometimes makes for tough reading...Still, he brings alive Friedman, dead and gone since 1980.
In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone recounts the stranger-than-fiction story of how the 23-year-old Smith was hired in 1916, along with other scholars, by an eccentric tycoon who wanted to find secret messages in the work of Shakespeare ... She was a poet who taught herself to break codes; she caught gangsters during Prohibition; and, oh yeah, she was married to a godfather of the N.S.A. ...read her letters from a hundred years ago, her college diary, her original poems, her original code work, letters that she wrote to her kids in code ...a broader book that included other codebreakers as major characters ...about a code-breaking Quaker poet who caught gangsters, hunted Nazis and helped win the world wars, only to be left out of the history books by men.
Fans of forgotten history, take note. Fagone has found a twentieth-century story that reads more like a thriller than nonfiction. Furthermore, Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s life has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood hit, and she is long overdue for the limelight … Riveting, inspiring, and rich in colorful characters, Fagone’s extensively researched and utterly dazzling title is popular history at its very best and a book club natural.
After years of archival research wading through recently declassified documents, Fagone pieced together Elizebeth’s life in his new book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies ... What emerges is not just Friedman’s forgotten contribution to code breaking but also a fascinating swath of American history that begins in Gilded Age Chicago and moves to the inner workings of our intelligence agencies at the close of WWII ...based on a true story. Elizebeth reverse-engineered the Nazi cipher that was based on this potboiler ... She was a poet and a literature scholar. And yet she was able to use her abilities to see deeply into this world of secret communication ...when you start to look at history through Elizebeth's eyes, you realize that the rise of these agencies was very messy. Her whole career, she was called in to fix the messes.
Foremost among those who solved the mysteries of foreign code was a remarkable American couple, Elizebeth and William Friedman. Elizebeth’s story is told in highly readable prose by Jason Fagone, who makes the complicated subject of codes comprehensible (more or less) to an ignorant layman ... Given that William was the subject of a 1976 biography, Mr. Fagone’s focus is on Elizebeth, whose papers, along with those of her husband, are at the George C. Marshall library at Virginia Military Institute ... A complicated read, to be sure, but a worthwhile one.
Fagone explains without arduous technicality how the process worked—then pen and paper, without machines. Between the wars, the two wrote books, and Elizebeth helped crack messages from rumrunners for the Coast Guard. World War II brought the challenges of breaking Magic and Enigma, among other astounding achievements across the globe. An engaging resurrection of a significant player in the world of cryptology.
Journalist Jason Fagone recreates a world and a cast of characters so utterly fascinating they will inhabit the psyches of its readers long after the book has been read … Fagone chronicles the couple’s lives and accomplishments against the backdrop of the birth and growth of the modern intelligence community. His research is exhaustive and his storytelling, spellbinding … Fagone sheds light on a too-long-overlooked story of a remarkable woman and her accomplishments.
