Working
by Robert A. Caro 
Published Alfred A. Knopf 2019
Pages 207 Price $25

For scholars, writers, and history buffs, this is book to read  and reread this year. It is brand new and worth buying to have in your library. As for me, books are invading my house, but there is always room for one more. I love books.

In this short but meaningful book, famous author, Robert Caro, discusses  the topics of researching, interviewing and writing. The book is a creative volume dealing with random thoughts of ideas and struggles for perfection, as well as  personal stories connected to the people he has written about over the years.

Even the book’s endpapers are photo copies of edited and crossed out materials worked on over and over again, showing that writing is not an easy feat even for those who are experienced, but it is a labor of love, love of words and the expression of ideas in print.

Caro relates that writing takes discipline, drive, passion for details, ability to sort out facts, and the talent to hear a story. Caro’s power to hear a story in the biographies which he has written can be seen in his monumental works like the biography of  Robert Moses, titled “The Power Broker,” (1974) and the four volumes on the life of Lyndon Johnson, (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012). Caro has won two Pulizer Prizes and many other literary awards. He is known for his outstanding research and detail.

In his youth, Caro went to the Horace Mann School in the Bronx and then to Princeton. He started his career as a reporter and an investigative journalist in New Jersey. He taught journalism at Rutgers while starting to study for his Ph.D and dropped out but went on to study at Harvard as a Neiman Fellow where he became interested in city planning. However, Caro’s great love was writing and he returned to journalism again and again, as well as started writing biographies.

Caro says in his new book titled “Work,” ”Here’s a book very unlike the others I have written, very much shorter,….but its intention is to share some experiences I have had. It is not a full scale memoir. I am in fact planning on writing  such a memoir and readers who prefer longer books will not be disappointed in the length. Here in the current book instead I share some scattered experiences I have had writing the books on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.”

Caro asks,“So if this book is not a full fledged memoir what is it?  It’s a series of pieces, some previously published, some newly written about my work and how I do it.”

“The first part of the book was adapted from a lecture including a few recollections of being a newspaper man.The second part of the book deals with ‘The Power Broker,’ the life of Robert Moses and how I did research for it. The remainder of the book centers around Lyndon Johnson,” said Caro.

My favorite section was on interviewing. Caro states, “Silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it, (as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer.”) Caro continued, “When I am waiting for a person that I am interviewing to give me a piece of information I want, I wait for them to break their silence. I write in my notebook, SU (for shut up.) If anyone were to ever look through my notebooks they would find a lot of SU’s there.” The message Caro implied was to listen and wait for information, not to fill in with small talk.

This book is for people who love words. Most of all it is for people who want to read about the process of writing, research,  and interviewing by a famous journalist and author who has written many award- winning biographies. I recommend it for  all libraries, journalists, writing students, and biography lovers.

***
A Woman of No Importance
by Sonia Purnell
Published by Viking 2019
pages 316 Price $28

This book is riveting. It is about an American woman who drives an ambulance in World War II in France, travels through Europe helping the allies, and is an American spy who helped win World War II.

There are many reasons Virginia Hall was driving an ambulance in World War II in France. One reason was she felt rejected from society because of the loss of a leg in a tragic accident. Even in today’s world she would not have been accepted into the U.S. army with an impairment like that, to work in the front lines of a war, not to mention she was a woman. Women did not serve at the war front, unless they were nurses in 1940. But France needed her as well as all the allies. She was a fearless unconventional woman during her time.

Virginia Halll smoked, drank, and set up networks of spies to help the allies and United States. She worked in the British and American secret service.

Born in 1906, she was raised  as a socialite to get married and have children in Baltimore, Maryland. She came from a financially secure family and could have lived her life as a socialite. But she had a burning belief of female emancipation. She persuaded her parents to allow her to travel in Europe. At  the age of twenty in 1926, Virginia moved to Paris, France.There she met many artists and writers like  Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. During the 1930’s she lived in France and Europe and became fluent in French and Italian.

France had been occupied and America refused to enter the war at that time. Daughters in America led sheltered lives but not Virginia Hall. She was against fascism and Hitler from day one and outspoken about it. She could not stand idly by while  the German army ravished Europe. She had dreamed of becoming the first American Ambassador from the United states but got turned down by the U.S. State Department.

However, in 1940 she became an undercover agent for Britain. Churchill thought Virginia Hall could overcome anything. She did pull off some miracles. She was known as the spy with a wooden leg because while in Turkey she had a tragic accident and lost one leg below the knee. Yet, as an undercover agent she rescued downed airmen, radioed information to the allies, and led three French resistance forces in guerrilla warfare. She helped change history.

The Gestapo considered her the most dangerous of all allied spies. She worked for the United States, United Kingdom and Free France.

In 1945 she won the Distinguished Service Cross from the OSS Chief, General William Donovan for her work in helping the allies win the war. The Office of Strategic Operations was a forerunner to the CIA. President Truman in 1946 would develop it into the CIA.

However, Virginia returned to the United States in 1945 as a stranger to her own country. Finding work was not easy. Her old friend General Eldridge Durbrow, former American Vice Consul to Warsaw, now running the Eastern Europe Desk at the State Department, recommended her to join the CIA during the Truman administration in 1946. She was one of the first women to join it. She could speak fluent Italian and French and was a great asset.

The CIA was originally designed to  counter soviet inspired activities across Europe. She worked in the CIA during the Cold War. Her adventures with the CIA for more than a decade rival fictional novels. This book in fact reads like a novel.

The writing is fast, clear, filled with action, and describes a real person that led a life like a female OO7.She is like a female James Bond. Her life could be made into a film. Virginia Hall broke all the stereotypes of women who in the past were considered too emotional or fragile to carry out assignments, or to keep messages clear and secret, and to have the ability to adjust to new immediate dangers while working in the field, being able to protect  themselves and others while doing so.

Virginia Hall was an amazing woman who broke the glass ceiling in expectations of women as executives who could handle anything in a crisis.  During her career which spanned from 1940-1966, she did remarkable things and helped our nation survive a difficult time against the tyranny of Hitler. She died in 1982 at the age of 76 in Rockville, Maryland after a lifetime of heroic feats.

The CIA named a building in Washington D.C. in her honor. This book reads like an action packed novel but is a biography reflecting real life experiences of a woman who was basically unknown to the general public. However, in telling the story of Virginia Hall now, the author, Sonia Purnell makes history come alive. I recommend the book highly. I could not put it down.

— Pat Davidson Reef is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. She received her Masters Degree at the University of Southern Maine.She taught English and Art History at Catherine McAuley High for many years. She now teaches at the University of Southern Maine in Portland in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Classic Films. She recently wrote a children’s book,”Dahlov Ipcar Artist,” and is now writing another children’s book “Bernard Langlais Revisited.”