Spying on Spies
How Elizebeth Smith Friedman Broke the Nazis' Secret Codes

Here was my review… ▫️ The story is extremely streamlined which flies in the face of its own premise. And unnecessarily repetitive — I get it, confirmation bias exists. ▫️ To top it off, the narration from Sandy Rustin felt distractingly like I was being read to in elementary school. …before I realize......more

I like how this book is not just about cryptology, the study of codes, or the art of writing and solving them, but it is a glance into Elizebeth's life. She graduated from college with a degree in English but couldn't find a job because she was a female. She traveled to Chicago and knocked on every......more

This fascinating and easy to understand middle grade book details the historical record of one of America’s most important – and mostly unknown – cryptographer and code breaker of all time. Elizebeth Smith Friedman (along with her husband William) was instrumental in breaking the “unbreakable” Nazi......more

In her long life breaking codes and thus saving millions of lives, Elizebeth Friedman had to suffer a lot of fools, from gushing reporters delighted a ‘petite housewife’ was a famous cryptographer, to Herbert Hoover who routinely leaked secrets like a sieve. No fool, she took her secrets to the grav......more

This is a little gem of a book. Written for younger readers it tells the story of Elizebeth Friedman, a cryptanalyst who broke the codes of criminals during prohibition in the US and the Enigma codes during World War II. I’m ashamed to saw I had never heard of her before this despite being familiar......more