Evening Book Club: Book Club
Contact Information
For more information regarding the Evening Book Club, please contact: Jaclyn Gomez at jgomez@rcls.org
Meeting Schedule
Next Meeting:
April 26, 2021 at 7pm
Via ZOOM
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions
None for this book.
Source:
Book Summary
Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynne Olson
In 1941, a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour became the leader of a vast Resistance organization--the only woman to hold such a role. Brave, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country's conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Her group's name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah's Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. Marie-Madeleine's codename was Hedgehog.
No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence as Alliance--and as a result, the Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents, including her own lover and many of her key spies. Fourcade had to move her headquarters every week, constantly changing her hair color, clothing, and identity, yet was still imprisoned twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape, once by stripping naked and forcing her thin body through the bars of her cell. The mother of two young children, Marie-Madeleine hardly saw them during the war, so entirely engaged was she in her spy network, preferring they live far from her and out of harm's way.
An interview with the author
An interview with the author
Book Reviews
Reviews of our current book.
Click on the links to read the full review!
-
The Washington PostIn December 1940, the operations chief of France’s largest spy network walked into a bar in the port city of Marseille to recruit a source. The potential recruit was named Gabriel Rivière. He was a burly, mustachioed man who knew more about maritime traffic in the Mediterranean than anyone in town, and as he stared at the spymaster, his jaw hit the floor.
“Good God!” he shouted. “It’s a woman!”... -
Los Angeles Review of BooksMarie-Madeleine Fourcade, asked what she’d done during World War II, once described herself as “the wife of an officer, the mother of a family, a member of no political party, and a Catholic.”
What she failed to mention was that she had led some 3,000 agents in Alliance, the largest and most important French secret intelligence network against the Nazis. It provided crucial information to England’s MI6 on German submarine operations, V-1 and V-2 rocket development, Nazi preparations prior to the Allied invasion of Normandy, and myriad other German plans and maneuvers... -
New York TimesWhy have most of us never heard of Marie–Madeleine Fourcade? Why is her name missing from the honor roll of war heroes carved into thousands of monuments in hundreds of French village squares? Might the fact that this hero — the leader of one of France’s most successful anti-Nazi resistance organizations — was not a hero, but a heroine, have something to do with her absence from history? There is reason to believe so. At the end of World War II, the triumphant Gen. Charles de Gaulle designated 1,038 people as resistance heroes. Only six of those heroes were women, and Fourcade, who ran the longest-running spy network, was not among them. In “Madame Fourcade’s Secret War,” her fast-paced and impressively researched account, Lynne Olson corrects that historical injustice. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade emerges as a vivid and pivotal player in the French Resistance...
The Author's Website
The author's website.
-
Lynne OlsonFor information on the author: back ground information, awards, bibliography, etc.
Do you have a suggestion for a book?
Is there a book you love that you would like to share? How about a title that you've had on your "to read" list for a while? Send an email to bkdiscuss@hkdpl.org and you can join in the reading fun.