Damien Lewis

Churchill's Hellraisers by Damien Lewis. This was a non-fiction read that told about the cooperation (or lack of it) between the English military and the Italian partisans during WWII. Southern Italy was liberated fairly quickly, but further north the Germans were in firm control. The "dividing" line between the Allies and the Germans was called the "Gothic Line", a term I had not heard before. To be honest, there were too many people and too many sub-plots. This book needed a good editing! All in all, it was "good" book, but not a great book. It appears to have been researched thoroughly. 411 pages… (mehr)

nonfiction/history - WW2 French/British/American espionage in Allied resistance to Axis forces, including some very significant contributions by Josephine Baker (the most astronomically famous/successful Black woman entertainer of her time), 1939-1945.

Interesting but not very accessible or easy to read, and not as revealing of Baker's adventures as one might hope, instead providing more details about her fellow spies (who broke with convention and actually wrote books about their deeds).

I liked this (just the 10 years' worth of effort that must have gone into the research makes it worth a read) but I would have gotten more out of it if it had focused more on JB (perhaps not really possible due to a lack of surviving primary sources). My brain had to keep switching gears between the parts that talked about her and all the parts that talked about the tactics and strategizing of putting together the various moving pieces of the spy networks, and trying to keep all the pseudonyms for different spies straight, and sometimes having to stop and reread sentences because of strange, unclear phrasing and odd sentence structure. So it also took me longer to plod through this than expected, but I do think it's a part of history that should definitely be told so I'm glad the author has labored over discovering the truth to the best that could be determined from the various classified/unclassified sources this time.… (mehr)