Biography:
A User’s Guide
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008)
Biography requires insight, argues Dr. Carl Rollyson in his latest book, Biography: A User’s Guide. To appreciate the person studied — to trust the subject of a biography — the biographer must know the subject so well as to be able to assess the subject’s self-honesty. Rollyson discusses this issue on pp. 164-168. The subject is Martha Gellhorn; the biographical form, her letters (collected by Caroline Moorehead); the example, a look at Hiss Case protagonists Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.
The Terminal Spy:
A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal, and Murder
(New York: Doubleday, 2008)
The Terminal Spy deals with untraceable assassinations, a terrible tradition in the Russian Federation that comes from the Soviet Union. Assassination is something Whittaker Chambers (among many defecting communists) feared. In today’s Russia, it has arisen to international prominence anew with the apparent assassination of Alexander Litvinenko.
When Men Were the Only Models We Had:
My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun may have mentioned Whittaker Chambers only a few times in passing in her 2002 memoirs When Men Were the Only Models We Had, but she sheds more light on Chambers and his contemporaries than many others.
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Carolyn Heilbrun: When Men Were the Only Models We Had
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Great Dames:
What I Learned from Older Women
Marie Brenner
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2000)
Marie Brenner, who has penned the amazing, gripping investigative thriller The Insider among other books, put together one book I found rather misleading. Ostensibly, Great Dames is, according to the subtitle, about women she learned from. A few chapters into the book, however, we readers realize she did not know many of them very well. In fact, she relies heavily on anecdotes from others and from her subjects’s memoirs. Diana Trilling is a good example, and Brenner’s treatment of Whittaker Chambers a good case in point.
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Equally erring about Hiss
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Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
Susan Jacoby
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
[This article first appeared in The Washington Times]
Susan Jacoby is a gifted writer. She is deft and light. As a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers (who was another gifted writer, if rarely so light), I looked forward to Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. How would she weigh in on the Hiss case?
The Lost Spy:
An American in Stalin’s Secret Service
Andrew Meier
(New York: W. W. Norton, August 2008)
Official website: thelostspy.com
Lauren Kim: dust jacket designer
[Reviewed from a galley copy provided by the publisher]
In 1992, Boris Yeltsin held out a dossier with a file inside to an American official:
Declassified:
50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History
Thomas B. Allen
(New York: Random House for National Geographic, 2008)
(Reviewed from a galley copy provided by the publisher)
To have 50 of the most important top-secret documents in history summarized in one handy reference book is an excellent idea.
