If you know the name Hedy Lamarr, you probably know her only as an actress. So how is it she is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame? Her most important invention was a 1942 patent for a radio-guided torpedo system superior to the ones then in use in World War II (and whose principles are incorporated into Bluetooth technology). The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict is a biographical novel telling the story of Lamarr, an Austrian of Jewish descent who escaped a controlling, fascist-sympathizing husband before the war. She longed to be recognized for her intellect as much as her beauty and acting talent, a desire which should come to fulfillment in readers of this book.
One of the novels receiving the most advance buzz this year in media, publishing, and library circles is The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. A sleeping college student is unable to be awakened. She is the first in a spreading contagion which leads to a quarantine of the town while scientists work frantically to identify the illness and devise a treatment. The sleepers show record high levels of brain activity, indicating heightened dreaming is occurring, but little else is known.
In The Current by Tim Johnston, the vehicle of a college student plunges into a river, killing the driver and leaving her passenger alive. It may not have been an accident. The survivors father, a retired sheriff, was unable to close a similar case a decade earlier, with consequences in the present.
Turning to nonfiction, a fascinating story is told in The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre. KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky, disillusioned by the Soviet crushing of Hungarian and Czech democratic movements, became the most important supplier of Soviet intelligence to the West in the entire history of the Cold War. The British MI6 shared his information with the Americans without ever revealing his name. The CIA grew obsessed with discovering the source of the information, which ironically led to the Soviets discovering the betrayal. The CIA officer assigned to the case was Aldrich Ames, himself the most damaging traitor in American intelligence history. Luckily, Gordievsky was successfully exfiltrated from the USSR in an operation worthy of a Jason Bourne story.
How French curators successfully hid most of the Louvres art treasures from the Nazis during World War II is recounted in Saving Mona Lisa by Gerri Chanel.
