Josephine Baker's Secret War

Diamond, a historian of wartime France, focuses on the years when Baker used her celebrity as cover for French counterintelligence work, collecting and passing along Allied information during the North Africa campaign and later performing without pay for Allied troops. Reviewers have been careful to note this isn't a spy thriller: Baker's actual intelligence output was modest, and Diamond's real contribution is showing how Baker converted stardom itself into a form of wartime utility, using stage lighting rigged from ambulance headlamps and turning circles of soldiers into makeshift dressing rooms. It's a portrait of resourcefulness under constraint more than derring-do, grounded in archival material previously unused by Baker's other biographers.