Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II – October 2, 2018 by Liza Mundy

Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand 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 code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age – February 10, 2012 by Kurt W. W. Beyer

The career of computer visionary Grace Murray Hopper, whose innovative work in programming laid the foundations for the user-friendliness of today’s personal computers that sparked the information age. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry.

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II – March 24, 2020 by Sonia Purnell

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.”  The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill’s “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”  She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and — despite her prosthetic leg — helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it. Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall — an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity.  A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman’s fierce persistence helped win the war.

Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy – January 15, 2019 by Larry Loftis

The year is 1942, and World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer Captain Peter Churchill. As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris’s Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues.

Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine – April 5, 2016 by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew

Blind Man’s Bluff is an exciting, epic story of adventure, ingenuity, courage, and disaster beneath the sea. This book reveals previously unknown cold war activities to include secret missions to track Russian submarines, tap Soviet underwater telephone cables, and even attempt to steal a Soviet submarine with the help of billionaire Howard Huges. A magnificent achievement in investigative reporting, Blind Man’s Bluff reads like a spy thriller, but with one important difference — everything in it is true.

Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union June 14, 2016 by Stephen Budiansky

In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky—a longtime expert in cryptology—tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA’s obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency’s reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures.

Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway –  September 15, 2013 by Elliot W Carlson and Donald M Showers

Elliot Carlson’s award-winning biography of Capt. Joe Rochefort is the first to be written about the officer who headed Station Hypo, the U.S. Navy’s signals monitoring and cryptographic intelligence unit at Pearl Harbor, and who broke the Japanese navy’s code before the Battle of Midway. The book brings Rochefort to life as the irreverent, fiercely independent, and consequential officer that he was.

The Liberty Incident Revealed: The Definitive Account of the 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship – September 15, 2013 by A. Jay Cristol

The Liberty Incident Revealed is the complete and final story about the Israeli Air Force and Navy attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War in June 1967. Cutting through all of the controversy and conspiracy theories about Israel’s deadly attack, Cristol revises his well-regarded book about the event with an expanded and in-depth analysis of all of the sources, including the released tapes of the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts.

The US Navy’s On-the-Roof Gang: Volume I – Prelude to War – April 1, 2021 by Matt Zullo

This is an historical novel based on the unknown true-life story of the “On-The-Roof Gang,” the U.S. Navy’s fledgling radio intelligence organization in the years leading up to World War II. It is based on the real life of Harry Kidder, a U.S. Navy radioman who first discovered and deciphered Japanese katakana telegraphic code while stationed in the Philippines in the 1920s, discovering that he was listening to Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) radio communications. Kidder taught others the nascent art of intercepting IJN communications on the roof of the Main Navy Building in Washington, DC. From 1928 to 1941, 176 Sailors and Marines attended this training and were then stationed as radio intercept operators around the Pacific. These men would become known as the On-The-Roof Gang and were charged with keeping track of the IJN as they prepared for war with the United States.

The US Navy’s On-the-Roof Gang: Volume 2 – War in the Pacific – April 1, 2021 by Matt Zullo

This second volume begins with the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and documents the contributions of the On-the-Roof Gang during World War II. It focuses on the wartime stories of the On-the-Roof Gang intercept operators, some who were stationed in Hawaii, some who survived a tortuous existence in a POW camp, others who had to evacuate their intercept sites, and still others who performed intercept operations while at sea during some of the most famous naval battles of World War II.

At All Costs – May 1, 2015 by Matt Proietti

In 1967, after 16 years in uniform, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Dick Etchberger is starting to make plans for a post-military life when he is invited to participate in a clandestine Vietnam War mission. There’s a catch, though: he must accept the assignment before he’s told of the location. Etchberger quickly agrees to this condition and is sent to Southeast Asia with two dozen other Air Force technicians to run a secret radar site atop a remote peak. The mission is initially successful, though the team’s presence on the mountain is known almost immediately. The enemy soon launches a largely ineffective aerial assault on the camp. A later ground attack, however, is not and results in the Air Force’s greatest loss of ground personnel in the war. Etchberger’s heroic actions lead to the survival of three men, but not his own.

Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII – August 7, 2012 by Chester Nez

His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength—both physical and mental—to excel as a marine.  During World War II, the Japanese had managed to crack every code the United States used. But when the Marines turned to its Navajo recruits to develop and implement a secret military language, they created the only unbroken code in modern warfare—and helped assure victory for the United States over Japan in the South Pacific.

The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technical Revolution  – March 23, 1998 by Robert Buderi

The Invention That Changed the World explores how a small group of radar pioneers won the second World War and launched a technical revolution. The technology that was created to win World War II—radar—has revolutionized the modern world. This is the fascinating story of the inventors and their inventions.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race – December 6, 2016 by Margot Lee Shetterly

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.

Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars: The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission – October 19, 2021 by Col. Eileen M. Collins USAF

Eileen Collins was an aviation pioneer her entire career, from her crowning achievements as the first woman to command an American space mission as well as the first to pilot the space shuttle to her early years as one of the Air Force’s first female pilots. She was in the first class of women to earn pilot’s wings at Vance Air Force Base and was their first female instructor pilot. She was only the second woman admitted to the Air Force’s elite Test Pilot Program at Edwards Air Force Base. NASA had such confidence in her skills as a leader and pilot that she was entrusted to command the first shuttle mission after the Columbia disaster, returning the US to spaceflight after a two-year hiatus. Since retiring from the Air Force and NASA, she has served on numerous corporate boards and is an inspirational speaker about space exploration and leadership.

Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut – August 31, 2021 by Samantha Cristoforetti

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti’s intimate account of her first journey to the International Space Station, to which she returns in 2022, as commander of Expedition 68a—only the fourth woman to command the ISS. With Cristoforetti as our guide, we’re called to become “apprentice astronauts” and experience the world anew through the visor of a space suit’s helmet. Bonding with crew members to tackle challenges as a team, lifting off from the launchpad in a roar of engines, discovering the strange wonders of weightlessness, seeing Earth with a fresh perspective after a bittersweet return to solid ground . . . all these moments and more reveal what it really takes to escape our planet’s gravity in pursuit of a goal.

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey – April 5, 2022 by Fred Haise

In the gripping Never Panic Early, Fred Haise,Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 13, offers a detailed firsthand account of when disaster struck three days into his mission to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded, a crewmate uttered the now iconic words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and the world anxiously watched as one of history’s most incredible rescue missions unfolded. Haise brings readers into the heart of his experience on the challenging mission–considered NASA’s finest hour–and reflects on his life and career as an Apollo astronaut.

All-American Boys – July 15, 2010 by Walter Cunningham

The All-American Boys* is a no-holds-barred candid memoir by a former Marine jet jockey and physicist who became NASA’s second civilian astronaut. Walter Cunningham presents the astronauts in all their glory in this dramatically revised and updated edition that was considered an instant classic in its first edition over two decades ago. From its insider’s view of the pervasive “astropolitics” that guided the functioning of the astronaut corps to its thoughtful discussion of the Columbia tragedy, *The All-American Boys* resonates with Cunningham’s passion for humanity’s destiny in space which endures today. This is a story of the triumph of American heroes. Cunningham brings us into NASA’s training program and reveals what it takes to be an astronaut. He poignantly relates the story of the devastating Apollo 1 fire that took the lives of three astronauts and his own later successful flight on Apollo 7.

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America’s Race in Space – July 1, 2000 by Eugene Cernan

Eugene Cernan was a unique American who came of age as an astronaut during the most exciting and dangerous decade of spaceflight. His career spanned the entire Gemini and Apollo programs, from being the first person to spacewalk all the way around our world to the moment when he left man’s last footprint on the Moon as commander of Apollo 17. Between those two historic events lay more adventures than an ordinary person could imagine as Cernan repeatedly put his life, his family and everything he held dear on the altar of an obsessive desire.

My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir – May 25, 2021 by Katherine Johnson

In this memoir, Katherine shares her personal journey from child prodigy in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia to NASA human computer.  In her life after retirement, she served as a beacon of light for her family and community alike.  Infused with the uplifting wisdom of a woman who handled great fame with genuine humility and great tragedy with enduring hope, My Remarkable Journey ultimately brings into focus a determined woman who navigated tough racial terrain with soft-spoken grace — and the unrelenting grit required to make history and inspire future generations.

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