A book to read

A couple of readers of Comment Central have suggested to me that they would like more book recommendations. I intend to oblige. So every so often these "Books to Read" posts will appear. They won't be new books, just good ones that I think you will find stimulating and worthwhile.

Let me kick off with a volume I have only just finished myself - and thought was truly superb.

Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, An Un-American Life, is the story of an extraordinary man in extraordinary times.

The book tells the tale of Chambers the spy and Chambers the defector before following the course of the famous Alger Hiss trials. The narrative is gripping - murder, espionage, perjury, it's all there.

And the evidence that the upstanding liberal apparatchik was a communist spy is laid out in detail. Some of the great figures of the American left, from Adlai Stevenson to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, appeared as character witnesses for Hiss. And he was defended from the President down.

But it is obvious from Tanenhaus's book that Hiss was guilty and that his guilt was quite plain at the time. The insistence of liberals that in any great historical drama the liberal must be the hero, blinded these great men to the truth.

A fabulous book.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Richard Nixon, a lawyer by training and a young Representative from California, got his political start from the Alger Hiss hearings in Congress in the 1940s.

[naq]

Very appropriate choice of books to discussion on the night before Halloween -- almost as good as the special Halloween photos on the new Whittaker Chambers website http://www.WhittakerChambers.net/.

Pumpkin Papers: how droll!