“Mundy skillfully interweaves the history of the war and the evolution of modern military intelligence with the daily lives of the women who were racing to decipher the messages of the enemy, while dealing with bureaucratic rivalries, administrative sexism, romance and heartbreak on the home front … We owe Mundy gratitude for rescuing these hidden figures from obscurity. Even more valuable is her challenge to the myth of the eccentric, inspired, solitary male genius, like Alan Turing. As Mundy demonstrates, code-breaking in World War II ‘was a gigantic team effort,’ and ‘genius itself is often a collective phenomenon.’ Codes were broken by the patient labor of groups of people ‘trading pieces of things they have learned and noticed and collected.’ I suspect there are more stories of hidden figures waiting to be told. But in writing this book, Mundy has broken some of the codes that kept them hidden for so long.”
–Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post, October 6, 2017
Read more of Elaine’s reviews here
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