A solid look at the specifics of the case as well as a useful overview of the ideological debate gripping America.
A vigorous reappraisal of the Hiss-Chambers espionage affair, leaving no doubt of Hiss’ guilt.
Retired U.S. intelligence analyst Shelton provides a systematic chronicle of the affair, introducing the events to a generation who, she suspects, knows little of that fraught era, when left-leaning academics and intellectuals flirted with Soviet Communism before the extent of Stalin’s totalitarianism was generally acknowledged. The book encompasses familiar biographies of Alger Hiss, a Baltimore-raised brilliant student of Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law School who went on to become a high-level U.S. State Department officer, and Whittaker Chambers, a Columbia University dropout of exceptional writing ability who became a senior Time editor. By contrast and comparison, Shelton reveals how Hiss used his upper-middle-class German breeding, fancy education and good looks during his two perjury trials to discredit the more slovenly, dumpy Chambers. Hiss, a committed New Dealer, as many communists were, met Chambers when he was recruited during the mid ’30s into the so-called Ware Group, a communist cell in Washington, D.C. As a high-placed government lawyer, Hiss had access to classified information and passed it to Chambers, who had the documents copied then delivered to his Soviet superior. However, Chambers’ crisis of conscience over Stalin’s crimes by 1938 prompted him to quit the party, going underground to save himself from assassination. Until the mid ’40s, Hiss’ activities were apparently known by many in the State Department and FBI, and Shelton confirms the fact (made unfashionable thanks to the subsequent “red scare”) that communists had indeed “infiltrated” many agencies of the U.S. government. The author makes a good case for the willful blindness practiced by the pro-Hiss involved, delving carefully into the literature and documentation.
A solid look at the specifics of the case as well as a useful overview of the ideological debate gripping America.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5542-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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