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Whittaker Chambers: A Biography Paperback – April 28, 1998
| Sam Tanenhaus (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.
- Print length656 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherModern Library
- Publication dateApril 28, 1998
- Dimensions6 x 1.36 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100375751459
- ISBN-13978-0375751455
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The author took great care to present Mr. Chambers as he was...warts and all, so that no might say anything was covered up. The same can be said of Hiss, as he is portrayed.
There is one part of this book that stood out as a beacon to me: On page 434, the author writes :What sets the Hiss case apart, then and now, was not its mystery but the passionate belief of so many that Hiss must be innocent no matter what the evidence". I believe that a lot of the turmoil in this country today can be seen in that statement.
I highly recommend this book to any serious reader of history. Thank you.
The story of Chambers' life is also told by Chambers himself in his powerful autobiography "Witness". His life is a rather involved tale, and though the spy story is why Chambers became famous (infamous) it isn't reason why he is important. It is hard to recapture the vast esteem in which Stalin and the Soviet Union were held by the "literate" classes in American Society. But it doesn't take too much reading to peel back current revisionist writing that pretends the left rejected Stalin. It wasn't so. They loved Uncle Joe at the time of the Hiss case and made apologies for him even after the horrors of the Gulag were revealed. Even after Hiss' guilt has been proven beyond all but the most determined and self-blinded doubt, you can find those who insist on his innocence.
Whittaker Chambers was a gifted writer and a well regarded editor at Henry Luce's Time magazine. When he admitted his role in spying for the USSR and International Communism it represented the initial break in the dam. In "Witness", Chambers' autobiography, Chambers describes the agony he went through in realizing he had no choice but to take the course of trying to stop Hiss and thereby ruining his own life and irreparably harming his family.
Chambers was pessimistic about the West surviving a mortal struggle with Communism. He is often linked with McCarthy, but he thought McCarthy's recklessness more of a benefit to the other side.
"Witness" was an important best seller and is still in print. In it Chambers pours out his conscience and how his atheism turned to a deep faith and why that turned him against the movement he had embraced and had helped prosper through his gifts as a writer and editor.In this amazing book.
In this wonderful biography, Tanenhaus gives us context for all of this and so much more detail. The author also provides verification (and refutation) of claims made by and about Chambers. This book is beautifully written and carefully researched. The author shows great judgment and insight into all of the issues involved in this rich life at the extremes of human philosophy.
It is wrong to condemn this book and its author because of anger with Chambers. It is beyond all doubt that the thrust of Chambers' story was the truth. In my judgement, it is the truth in all but a few details. Tanenhaus is the reporter of fact and wishes that reality were different cannot change the facts. What is the old saying? You are entitled to your own interpretations, but not your own facts.
We owe Tanenhaus a great deal for putting such wonderful talent and years of hard work in giving us this outstanding book. This book was the subject of a great interview on Booknotes and is still available online. I am glad to see that this book is now part of the Modern Library series. It should be widely read.
My missing 0.25 stars are due only to lost opportunities. In my dreams, this book would have been a twice-as-fat dual biography of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. How they created themselves, how they met, how they diverged, how America judges them today. I can also imagine reading about how Chambers' closeted sexuality might have fit into his guilty repudiation of political subversion (or have I heard too many jokes about J. Edgar Hoover in drag?); Tanenhaus, however, devotes no more than a page to what seems like it should have been political dynamite in the 1950s. There also should have been a lot more photos. This was a highly visual book -- cinematic, really -- and I wanted to see Chambers' family, and the notorious pumpkin, and photostats of those incriminating scribbles. But the deep themes, such as Chambers' shifting messianism, his turning from one zealotry to another, how he inspired religious conservatives of my parents' generation to treat communism as not just America's enemy but God's, come through bright and clear.
I enjoyed reliving the ebb and flow of Americans' perception of the USSR and communism. Do kids today even know how infatuated intellectuals once were with Lenin and Stalin? How American communists had to pivot on their heels every time Uncle Joe did something like shake hands with Hitler, and then go to war against Hitler? How "Mission to Moscow" made it seem patriotic for Americans to work with Soviet communism? And how the postwar climate that tried to reckon with communism's ghastly reality slid into monotonous, mindless Red-baiting?
The best thing I can say about this biography is that it drives you straight to the Internet to look for the freshest take on the Venona intercepts and other clues about the extent of communist spying in that era. You want to read what Hiss's defenders insist upon. You want to ponder the difference between McCarthyism and reasonable national self-scrutiny. Can America still find room for people with subversive ideas (who may repent of them) if they refrain from subversive acts? How elastic can loyalty be?


