Amy's Reviews > Flirting with Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy

Adventurous doesn't mean progressive. The book seems to adopt Harrison's viewpoints without examining how those viewpoints were the product of her class, race, and nationality. Even for beach-read-level history, this is too credulous for my taste. By page 65, I found myself hate-reading it, so, DNF.

Little questions started to nag me right away. Harrison's family made its fortune in "the shipping industry" of 19th century Baltimore. Sounds like they were likely profiting at some point from the sale of human beings. If not, why not say so? I found myself nagged by more questions as I read that Harrison admired Woodrow Wilson, and that Harrison spent a week doing men's jobs at a shipbuilding site, receiving praise that totally ignored the centuries of Black women doing equally demanding physical labor. I understand that Harrison's work, then and later, wasn't about race in the US, but I began to form a picture of a woman who was invested in a belief system that she was content to leave unexamined. What kind of reporting could she do?

When Harrison spends time in Berlin in 1919 on, this perspective became unreadable. I assume that the homophobia in the descriptions of Berlin's cultural life was Harrison's, not the author's, but an editor should have suggested that the book make that distance explicit. Military intelligence was obviously using Harrison for her socialite connections to Germany's reactionary elite--okay, that's in the title, and I shouldn't complain that Harrison lacked expertise as a journalist and basic competence as a spy. But I was increasingly uncomfortable, especially as her travels took her to Poland and Lithuania.

I wish the book had asked questions about where Harrison fits in a broader story of espionage and nationalism from WWI through the Cold War (and maybe still). A small group of men, generally sharing the same worldview and class anxieties, recruited women mostly from the same class and manipulated them into endangering themselves in order to confirm the biases that decisionmakers already had. Even back then, wasn't anyone wondering whether any of these people knew what they were doing?

I really wanted to read about Harrison's adventures in the Middle East, especially because an introductory chapter led me to believe she at least wouldn't share the Islamophobia of today's conservatives. But I couldn't stand any more of her crashing around the world, name dropping and overestimating her own abilities. She was becoming a caricature. A different book might have helped her earn my respect or at least compassion. As it is, I kept thinking of Ivanka Trump presenting herself as a peer of Angela Merkel--nope.