Post #642853 by Cammo on Thu, Jul 5, 2012 6:26 AM

PART 1
Real Life Spies

In case you’re searching for some juicy summer reading, forget the brightly painted lurid potboilers of typical spy fiction, and curl up on a beach with these sultry true beauties instead.

Written by Samuel Epstein and Beryl Williams, and designed for the then-enormous legions of educated teen readers of 1953, The Real Book of Spies is an incredible history of covert operations from Biblical days to the present. What’s astounding about the stories told in this book is that they describe the goofy, strange beginnings of all the major intelligence organizations in their very earliest days. Germany’s Wilhelm Stieber, France’s Karl Shulmeister, and the start of the Russian informant system are all here, born a hundred years before their agencies became forces that shook the world.

The Real Book Series is of course the first kid’s series to be awarded a prize by the Boys Clubs of America, which I find sort of funny.