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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
A coolly objective look at the most controversial figure in the postwar crusade against American Communists. Whittaker Chambers (1901-61) made headlines in 1948 with his sensational accusation that former State Department official Alger Hiss was not only a Communist, but a spy, charges Hiss denied until his death in 1996. This scrupulously evenhanded biography concludes that Chambers told the truth, even as it pitilessly delineates his tortured family background, anguished sexual confusion, and political ruthlessness, which might well prompt doubts about his trustworthiness. Chambers' life makes a perfect case study of the most morally fraught period in American history. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Commentary Magazine, February 1997, Mark Falcoff
The recent death of Alger Hiss makes the appearance of Sam Tanenhaus's book a particularly timely intellectual and political event. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography bids fair to become the last word on one of the longest-running controversies of the cold war.
A coolly objective look at the most controversial figure in the postwar crusade against American Communists. Whittaker Chambers (1901-61) made headlines in 1948 with his sensational accusation that former State Department official Alger Hiss was not only a Communist, but a spy, charges Hiss denied until his death in 1996. This scrupulously evenhanded biography concludes that Chambers told the truth, even as it pitilessly delineates his tortured family background, anguished sexual confusion, and political ruthlessness, which might well prompt doubts about his trustworthiness. Chambers' life makes a perfect case study of the most morally fraught period in American history. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Commentary Magazine, February 1997, Mark Falcoff
The recent death of Alger Hiss makes the appearance of Sam Tanenhaus's book a particularly timely intellectual and political event. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography bids fair to become the last word on one of the longest-running controversies of the cold war.
Until now, Chambers'Witness was certainly the best book on the Hiss case. Apart from its extraordinarily high literary quality, no other source reconstructs so vividly the world of American Communism in the 1930's, and particularly that part of it conscripted into the service of Soviet espionage. What Tanenhaus does in this superb new biography is to widen the focus, interpreting the Hiss-Chambers controversy within the broader context of American political culture. The result is a monumental work of scholarship which benefits from a vast amount of new documentation, some of it made available as recently as two years ago. As such, Whittaker Chambers makes an invaluable contribution to the histories of American Communism, anti-Communism, and anti-anti-Communism. It is also as compelling to read as any espionage thriller.
One particular strength of Tanenhaus's narrative is, indeed, to show how the Hiss-Chambers controversy was transformed from an argument over the facts of a case to a class war between America's patrician liberal establishment and its populist opponents.
Whittaker Chambers was one of the deepest, knottiest, and most enigmatic characters of our age. In this riveting full-length portrait, Tanenhaus gives us the whole man, warts and all--while showing that, covered as he was with those warts, Whittaker Chambers spoke the truth.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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