Book and Dagger
Book and Dagger by Elyse Graham is one of 2026's most credible books, appearing on 1 of the year's most respected lists, including McKinsey & Company, for a Consensus Score of 15 out of 100.
Appears on these lists
Our take
AI-draftedGraham's subject — the professors, archivists, and rare-book dealers the OSS recruited to become wartime spies — is genuinely underexplored territory, and reviewers responded to the novelty as much as the storytelling. The dissent, voiced most sharply by The Harvard Crimson, is structural: the back half loses its throughline, wandering into tangents that dilute the intelligence-community focus.
In the press
“In her lively Book and Dagger, the historian Elyse Graham rescues a cast of scholar-spies from obscurity.”
The New York Times“The organization is shoddy, the focus is loose”
The Harvard Crimson
How the Consensus Score is calculated
Our Consensus Score is our own transparent editorial metric — not a user rating. It weighs each list by the credibility of its source, how recent the listing is, and any award status. Here is the full breakdown.
| Source | Authority | Recency | Award | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| McKinsey & Company | 0.80 | 0.85 | 1.00× | 0.68 |
| Weighted sum → Score | 0.68 → 15 | |||
Similar consensus books
Because they appear on some of the same lists.
Frequently asked
What lists is Book and Dagger on?
Book and Dagger appears on 1 list in our 2026 corpus, including McKinsey & Company.
What is its Consensus Score?
Book and Dagger has a Consensus Score of 15 out of 100, our transparent editorial measure of how many credible lists agree on it.