Agent Josephine : American beauty, French hero, British spy / Damien Lewis

Includes bibliographical references (pages 399-452) and index.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music hall diva renowned for her singing and exotic dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the most highly-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all "negroes and Jews." Yet, instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight she went from performer to Resistance spy. Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Agent Josephine transforms the scarcely known story of Josephine Baker in wartime. As a member of the French Nurse paratroopers, a cover for her spying work, Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and became a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served: the US, the nation of her birth; France, the land that embraced her during her adult career; and Britain, the country from which she took her orders, as one of London's most closely-guarded secrets. Baker's secret war is a true story of unbounded courage, passion, devotion and sacrifice, and of deep and bitter tragedy, fueled by her own desire to combat the rise of Nazism and fight for a more just future.