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The Woman All Spies Fear
- Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz
- Length: 7 hrs
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Publisher's summary
An inspiring true story, perfect for fans of Hidden Figures, about an American woman who pioneered codebreaking in WWI and WWII but was only recently recognized for her extraordinary contributions.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman had a rare talent for spotting patterns and solving puzzles. These skills led her to become one of the top cryptanalysts in America during both World War I and World War II.
She originally came to code breaking through her love for Shakespeare when she was hired by an eccentric millionaire to prove that Shakespeare's plays had secret messages in them. Within a year, she had learned so much about code breaking that she was a star in the making. She went on to play a major role decoding messages during WWI and WWII and also for the Coast Guard's war against smugglers.
Elizebeth and her husband, William, became the top code-breaking team in the US, and she did it all at a time when most women weren't welcome in the workforce.
Amy Butler Greenfield is an award-winning historian and novelist who aims to shed light on this female pioneer of the STEM community.
Includes a downloadable PDF of key exercises from the book
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Critic reviews
“A captivating account of the life and critical contributions of 'one of the most formidable code breakers in the world.'" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“Greenfield delivers the tale with enthusiasm and narrative flair, including lots of photos of her photogenic subject.” (The Bulletin, starred review)
“Inspiring, informative, and entertaining.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
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Our Mothers' War is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book.
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Amazing
- By Sam I on 02-04-22
By: Emily Yellin
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Agent Sonya
- Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe.
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Wanted to love it
- By Robert Bell on 09-30-20
By: Ben Macintyre
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The Secret Lives of Codebreakers
- The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park
- By: Sinclair McKay
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bletchley Park looked like any other sprawling country estate. In reality, however, it was the top-secret headquarters of Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School - and the site where Germany’s legendary Enigma code was finally cracked. There, the nation’s most brilliant mathematical minds - including Alan Turing, whose discoveries at Bletchley would fuel the birth of modern computing - toiled alongside debutantes, factory workers, and students on projects of international importance. Until now, little has been revealed about ordinary life at this extraordinary facility.
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Dull treatment of an exciting subject
- By Drew on 01-31-14
By: Sinclair McKay
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The Irregulars
- Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Prior to the U.S. entering WWII, a small coterie of British spies in Washington, D.C., was formed. They called themselves the Baker Street Irregulars after the band of street urchins who were the eyes and ears of Sherlock Holmes in some Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
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Spying in Washington
- By Sara on 10-03-14
By: Jennet Conant
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The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line
- Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II
- By: Major General Mari K. Eder US Army (Ret.)
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunn
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII - in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.
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Ending very poorly done
- By Jacqueline Bailey on 10-03-21
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Code Girls
- The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
- By: Liza Mundy
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Recruited by the US Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than 10,000 women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of codebreaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them.
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Just released, about 80% through this story
- By Roobah on 10-11-17
By: Liza Mundy
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In the Enemy's House
- The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies
- By: Howard Blum
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of strategically placed spies inside the United States, whose goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation's military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and young FBI supervisor Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage - the atomic bomb.
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Excellent non-fiction spy story
- By Katherine on 10-13-18
By: Howard Blum
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The Kennedys
- An American Drama
- By: Peter Collier, David Horowitz
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Who are the Kennedys? Are they the brilliant, heroic, extraordinary people their admirers believe them to be? Or are they arrogant, competitive, self-absorbed children of a willful and immensely rich patriarch, as their detractors claim? In fact, they are all of these things, and more.
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Well-written (and narrated) Kennedy history.
- By SBG on 09-17-19
By: Peter Collier, and others
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Russians Among Us
- Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin’s Spies
- By: Gordon Corera
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present.
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Should be required reading for every citizen
- By Amazon Customer on 02-27-20
By: Gordon Corera
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JFK
- Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956
- By: Fredrik Logevall
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 29 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history.
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Excellent Portrait of JFK & His Times
- By John David on 12-14-20
By: Fredrik Logevall
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The Fifties
- By: David Halberstam
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 34 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; and more.
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one of the very best
- By Chester Chellman on 09-25-18
By: David Halberstam
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Spies in the Family
- An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War
- By: Eva Dillon
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.
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LOVED it!
- By SaraofDI on 11-06-17
By: Eva Dillon
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"The Rest of Us"
- The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined.
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Book 3 of 3
- By Etoile NEOhio on 11-15-22
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What listeners say about The Woman All Spies Fear
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M. Galloway
- 01-12-23
Elizabeth Friedman- the real wonderwoman
My only negative comment is that I am not a fan of the narrator. Everything else about this book is fantastic. The author realized that one cannot tell the story of Elizabeth without telling the story of William. The two are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to separate their stories. Yet the author is able to highlight her professional and personal achievements while also showing how she supported William and he, her.
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- Erica D
- 03-04-24
Enjoyed it!
I enjoyed this book. It tells about a female code breaker during wwII who didn’t get the credit she deserved.
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Overall
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- diane mcintyre
- 03-13-23
A true story of a brilliant woman’s drive to serve her country while risking her life.
The story was spellbinding! Elizabeth was a Wonder Woman; raising a family, traveling for her many jobs, dealing with life threatening information and filling her mind with many secrets that she couldn’t disclose to anyone. And to add to the occupational stress she did not have the cooperation or support of the FBI or the NSA. Thank goodness she had the love of her life, William her husband. I thought the narrator was excellent.
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