DAMARISCOTTA — New York Times bestselling author Lynne Olson is scheduled to speak at 10 a.m. Tuesday, July 23, on the Chats with Champions stage at Skidompha Public Library’s Porter Hall, 184 Main St. Olson will discuss her latest book, “Madame Fourcade’s Secret War,” according to a news release from the library.
Lynne Olson Photo courtesy of Skidompha Public Library
Olson’s book tells the true story of Madame Fourcade: the daring and glamorous young woman who led France’s largest spy network against Hitler. Fourcade worked in a network of agents spread across occupied France, known as “Alliance.” They collected critical intelligence on everything from the movements of German U-boats to explosives on the bridges of Paris.
The Nazis pursued Alliance spies relentlessly, yet Fourcade evaded capture and even escaped from their clutches — twice. “Because she was a woman,” Olson writes, she knew she would be underestimated, “a miscalculation on which she was determined to capitalize,” according to the release.
Olson’s body of work on Britain and America before and during World War II has earned her international praise. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright deemed her “our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy,” according to the release.
Olson is the author of the national bestseller “Citizens of London,” “Last Hope Island,” “Troublesome Young Men” and “Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939–1941,” an instant New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book.
Born in Hawaii, Olson graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arizona. Before her days of novels, she worked as a journalist with the Associated Press as a national feature writer in New York, a foreign correspondent in AP’s Moscow bureau, and a political reporter in Washington. She left the AP to join the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, where she covered national politics and the White House.
Chats with Champions is a free community offering. This program is sponsored by Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop.
For more information, call the library at 563-5513.
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