2 comments about The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade.

1. Piers Morgan comes over as an arrogant young man with an ego bigger than Ben Nevis. But that's undoubtedly one of the qualities you need to survive in the UK's tabloid wars. A compelling book, with some amazing inside stories of Britain's royals and politicians. How much Morgan actually wrote down in his diaries and how much came out of his fertile mind remains something of a mystery, In his days as editor of the Daily Mirror he never shirked from running spoof stories.



2. This book wasn't what I expected it to be. I was slightly disappointed with it when I opened it and saw the diary style, small writing, I thought this is going to be really boring.
   How wrong I was, I took it on vacation and started reading it and it was very good, I found myself reading it at every opportunity.
   I am not a fan of Piers morgan but his Diary on life as a major Newspaper editor was excellent. It opened yours eyes on how Newspapers get their stories and headlines.
   It was a book well done.
   One little bit of advice though it is based mainly around British politics and celebrities

No comments about Preso sin Nombre, Celda sin Numero (THE AMERICAS).

5 comments about News Junkie.

1. News Junkie is the engaging memoir and personally revealing story of Jason Leopold and his willingness to risk an unhealthy and destructive life in exchange as an investigative reporter. An incredible autobiography of a genuinely hazardous career that came to involve selling drugs and stolen goods, News Junkie carries readers through the riveting true-life tale of a reporter's daily job dedicated to exposing corporate-crooks and politician, facing his own illegal behavior brought about by his own felonious behavior, his pressing need for regaining personal sobriety, and the impact upon his emotional well being of what he had been continuously confronted with while in the pursuit of his profession. With its superbly presented candor, News Junkie is very highly recommended reading both as a memoir offering unique insights into the mind and life of an investigative journalist, and as a "slice of life" window into the stories and personalities behind headline stories of corruption and crime.



2. This is a scary book. Jason Leopold was not a nice guy. He was a creep who would screw over anyone for drugs first, then news "scoops" later.
   
   This is a story of a guy whose misdirected intelligence and passion totally screw him up for a number of years. Finally, he starts to get on a path where he's doing some good, but he's still stuck with some very nasty habits that get him in trouble and keep him sabotaging himself, in spite of becoming a serial award winning reporter.
   
   As a writer I found Jason's book very inspiring. Not the nasty stuff-- but Jason describes the creative and energetic ways he went after stories. I've written for national magazines, with my own share of cover stories, and I've done some investigative leg and phone work. But Jason's descriptions of his efforts have already inspired me to go the extra distance to dig further into articles. The first article I applied this to rose to the top five articles of the month on my website, where we've published at least 400 articles so far this month.
   
   Jason writes about how he was tough on his reporters, as an editor. insisting that they go out on the street, covering their beat, not waiting for news to come to them. That's inspired me to take a similar approach in my own writing.
   
   If you're a reporter, this book is different than any I've seen. It's wild and wooly and while a bit apologetic, brutally honest.
   
   
   Recently, post the writing of this book, Jason reported that Karl Rove was about to be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the Plame CIA case. It didn't happen. Rove was never indicted. Now you could just write Jason off as an incompetent. But you could also wonder whether Rove got to Fitzgerald, or, that someone fed Jason bad info that was designed to set him up, because he was getting too close to the truth. I don't know what the answer is. Frankly, having published his report, I was embarassed by the article being wrong. When I got the word, I headlined the article. It didn't feel very good. But maybe that's what was supposed to happen-- what was intended by the people who set him up. I'm not apologizing for him. But I'm keeping my mind open to the possibility that the people who brought us the threat of WMDs in Iraq, who pulled one over on Colin Powell, the majority of the senate and most of the US could have also pulled one over on this news junkie.
   
   I see Jason as a man who can make a difference. I'm glad he's working for the progressive cause now. The right wing fights very, very dirty. They lie, cheat, and since they run the mainstream media, they propagandize, cover up and gloss over news that should be covered that isn't.
   
   We need more Jason Leopolds who are willing to do what it takes to dig up the truth. And we should expect that when he uses his enormous cojones to take on incredibly powerful, influential and wealthy players, he will occasionally be set up,occasionally stabbed in the back by editors, occasionally made to look bad, so his good work is questioned.
   
   Bottom line, this gritty autobiography tells a tale of a man who becomes a drug addicted, dealing, thieving criminal who quits abusing, cleans up his act and really achieves some significant successes in his life, not leaving all his flaws behind, but steadily making progress.
   
   It's a great read.
   
   About the inspiring part-- one must be selective about what one is inspired by. I chose to be inspired by his creative, energetic approach to digging up stories. [...].
   
   I find it interesting and extremely unusual that there are, at the writing of this review, a dozen reviews, most of the positive. All the positive, four or five star reviews have been rated as unhelpful by two to one. My guess is that some of the right wingers who have been attacking the author in the blogoverse have decided to "tar" the positive reviews. I expect the same will happen to this one. The fact is, I doubt that these review commenters have read the book, or care to. It is dishonest to take this approach.



3. I liked News Junkie a lot. The writing style give the reader a sense of time and place. You feel as if you are in the newsroom with Leopold.
   
   Jason Leopold is complex and a contradition. You like him and root for him, yet cringe at some of his actions. You wish the unfinished chapters of his life will bring happiness.



4. Leopold is a tough guy to like. He is a drug addict, a thief, and incredibly self-loathing. He is also a chronic complainer, believing that life has dealt him a terrible hand. Even when things in his life are going well, he manages to sabotage everything around him, almost losing his wife and career. Leopold's instability and ongoing war with himself make for incredibly entertaining stories.



5. You don't have to read the paper or even watch the news to appreciate this well written book. Sure, it centers around a fantastic journalistic story. It is also a story of addiction/sobriety, overcoming child abuse and a love story. It is a dark and gritty book that is hard to put down.

5 comments about Hef's Little Black Book.

1. You have to hand it to Hef. Well into his twilight years he manages to surround himself with beautiful, nubile young women who cater to his every whim.
   
   In "Hef's Little Black Book" little glimpses of Hef's life are shared. We learn that Millie (his first wife) cheated on him, thus opening the door for his dalliances. We discover that the gorgeous Barbie Benton broke up with him when she discovered he was double dipping with another. That movie night is a big time in Hef's life. That black silk pj's make for good outerwear etc.
   
   If you are a diehard Hef fan you may enjoy this book. On the other hand if you want to learn more about the playmates with shocking insights into Hef such as the awful reality that he does NOT use protection read Jill Ann Spaulding's book, "Upstairs".
   
   Overall "Hef's Little Black Book" is indeed all about Hef, and only for those who want nitty gritty details shared by Mr. Hefner about himself.



2. Hef's Little Black Book isn't some story of Playboy the magazine or the empire, a biog of Hef or anything more than really a kind of puff-piece valentine from Hef to himself. I say from Hef because he's listed as the author, though "and Bill Zehme" presumably did most of the writing, organizing, interviewing, and editing.
   
   However, given its parameters, the book works surprisingly well. Zehme did a similar book - a better one, though - on Sinatra a few years back, and its organization by subject/theme, its adoring fifties-style prose and please-pass-on-your-wisdom-o-master tone which strangely enough worked very well on the Sinatra piece is used again here. It's sort of effective. The book is a mixture of Zehme's narrative in the above voice, quotes from Hefner mixed in, and dozens of excellent photos of all types.
   
   Hef passes on pearls of wisdom regarding women, romance, enjoying life and games, business, sex and the like. The Bed is covered in detail, with blueprints and everything. Much of it is not especially deep or new or earthshattering. I don't know that it really touches on what makes Hef such a fascinating figure or so important a man in 20th century life. But it's not uninteresting to Hefner aficionados.
   
   What is in fact the goods on Hef is that he managed to first define the upscale male fantasy life, and then proceeded to insert himself into the picture and live it, for fifty nonstop years of uncompromising hedonism. In doing so he became a living symbol of the sexual revolution, and in the magazine's Playboy Philosophy he defended and explained his thinking brilliantly. It could not have worked without tremendous charm, business acumen (including the knowledge of when to step down from day-to-day operating control and let more capable managers take over), and self-control exercised over himself, and he surely kept very good people watching his back.
   
   This book doesn't tell that story. If interested, there are many out there that do; I particularily like Russell Miller's Bunny, from back in the troublesome 80s. But this book does have fantastic and rarely seen photos from the 50s, 60s and 70s which make up for a lot, and one does get a faint glimpse of an unusual man.



3. I bought this book because I thoroughly enjoyed the author's previous book "The Way You Wear Your Hat - Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin'". This book was much shorter, even though it could be argued that its subject is deserving of perhaps even greater coverage. The most fascinating thing I learned while reading this book is that Sinatra and Hefner did not really bond...Frank was kinda upset that Hef had all the girls. The Mansion was the one place to which Sinatra could go and NOT find it to be all about Sinatra.
   
   I knew very little about Hef until I read this book. I still don't know as much as I would have liked. This book is much more akin to what we would find out if Hef had written a dating profile on match.com (favorite movies, favorite food, favorite drink, etc). We learn very little about his formative years, other than that Hef's first great love did not love him back (but visits him at the mansion from time to time, even to this day). The author assumes that we know that Hef is wealthy, but we never get an idea of the degree of his wealth. I know that there is a magazine and a cable network....but younger readers may not know that there was also a television show, nightclubs, and a whole history extending back into the 1950's. These are only glanced over. It would have been nice to see more homage paid to the influence of Playboy on the shifting cultural attitudes during the 1960's.
   
   I look forward to the author's upcoming Johnny Carson book and hope that it takes on the same flavor as these other two. Then the "holy trinity of cool" will be complete.



4. this was out in so many stores, glad i found it! it made a great gift!



5. In 1974, I purchased Frank Brady's HEFNER (AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY). I was surprised because the author didn't offer any exclusive information - the book included nothing new or unknown. However, the author did report that Hefner was deeply in love and committed to Barbie Benton who he would marry soon. Well, he was wrong about that. Bottom line: There was nothing Brady's "unauthorized" biography that seemed worthy of being deemed unauthorized.
   
   When I was reading HEF'S LITTLE BLACK BOOK, I was once again taken by surprise. There was no new information - everything in the book was well known. Instead of poor writing, I've got to conclude that Hefner has no sexual secrets. Yet, he does write of secret sexual relationships, but he won't share because these concern others. It is not himself he is protecting. Unlike Nixon, Hefner destroyed the tapes by tossing them into the Pacific Ocean. I wonder: Is this disposal contrary to EPA regulations? Can Hefner be fined? Shall we hire the Titanic team to recover the tapes?
   
   One big inference emerged from reading: the Barbie Benton and Karen Christy conflict. Like everything else in this autobiography, this is a well known urban tale. Hefner was sleeping with both of these women with whom he claimed to dearly love. Reading between the lines, the authors suggest that Barbie and Karen were grossly insensitive to Hefner's sexual needs. He needed both of them, but neither could accept sharing him with another woman. Hefner was emotionally devastated, but eventually recovered. Today, Hefner has finally found a girlfriend who is willing to share him with two other women. If Barbie was willing to regularly share him with others, I wonder if they would be married today?
   
   I don't know if this little book was worth the money to read. Nevertheless, I found it to be a hoot.

5 comments about But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous.

1. I picked this book up because of the cover. I loved seeing 80's hair do and I read the back to find it amusing enough to buy. I never really knew who Jancee Dunn was before I read her book.
   
   I enjoyed the quick read and liked how it bounced between her family and her work, it is a story of someone my age(36) and it mirrored experiences of coming of age during the 80's and early 90's. I loved it.
   
   Heartwarming and honest



2. I loved this book! I loved the throwbacks to old fashion, Jersey-Hair, and general 90's quips. I laughed a lot. The pieces on celebrities were like a bonus of reading a trashy tabloid inside a novel. It was unlike what I normally read, it was refreshing and very enjoyable!!



3. You do not need to be from Jersey to love this book. Anyone who spent their adolescence cultivating a thin, fragile veneer of coolness to cover an inner dork will relate to Jancee. I did not want this book to end. I can't wait for the follow-up on the rest of Jancee's life. Funny, touching, and entirely real. (Just like a true Jersey girl!)



4. I waited a while before I purchased this book. It was definitly worth the wait



5. I am from New Jersey so I was thrilled to read a memoir about "one of my own" become as successful as Jancee has become in the world of reporting. Once I got my hands on it I loved the New Jersyisms as well as the wonderful writing of her life as a writer. This book is perfect for anyone who is down in the dumps and needs a good laugh. Jancee knows how to deliver :)

5 comments about The Soccer War.

1. As somebody who once lived in Honduras before the infamous soccer war of 1969, I long had Kapuscinski's book on my "must read" list. Though I bought it five years ago, I didn't get around to reading it till just now. I'm glad I did. THE SOCCER WAR is another sterling volume from this master of description.
   
   THE SOCCER WAR isn't a book about the absurd war between El Salvador and Honduras, triggered by World Cup qualification matches, but really caused by El Salvador's overpopulation and the subsequent overflow of Salvadorenos into much-emptier Honduras. The war may also be ascribed to the fact that neither country has been able to tame its landowning classes, who continue to this day to run rampant over the poor masses of people. In any case, this war, which happened decades ago, occupies only 30 pages of a 234 page book. The rest of the book contains vignettes from Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Burundi, Algeria, Tanganyika, Syria, Cyprus, and Ethiopia. I think another title would have given readers a better idea of what the book is about. Anyway, I would not say this book is about particular societies or countries, rather it is about the human condition. Kapuscinski, if you have read any of his other (excellent) work, specializes in inserting himself into extreme situations----war, rebellion, conflict, and abnormal behavior. Where the strictures of daily life have fallen down, we find him reporting, usually at considerable risk to his person. He is nearly burned to death in Nigeria, nearly executed in Burundi, nearly lynched in the Congo, nearly blown up in Honduras. In every case, he manages to portray some participants as humane and decent, or as simple people caught up in events beyond their control. He never writes off groups of people as `wild' or `barbarous', but manages to `read' them even as he faces almost certain death. The absurdity of all this violence, the violence that never ends on this planet, comes through loud and clear. Ryszard, you wrote your best, but nobody in charge listened. Readers of the book, however, will come away with a better understanding of human nature and its universal similarity on every continent, among every race and religion. From the stupidity, waste, and blood, we can learn. We just don't.



2. It's almost impossible to process the news with the same perspective after reading this book...what was true in the 60s still rings true today. I picked up this book while simultaneously reading articles in Esquire and The New Yorker about people (Bill Gates, Bill Clinton...) trying to make a difference in Africa. While I was made hopeful by the observations in today's mainstream press, I grew increasingly frustrated when confronted with the dark reality that Kapuscinski exposes.



3. Kapuscinski is the master of international journalism. Often he prefaces his accounts by saying something to the affect of, "Everyone told me that trying to get into the Congo was suicide. I had to do it." The result is a perspective that no one else is able to give, a sometimes brutal but eye-opening account of the effects of war.
   The best part of The Soccer War to me is Kapuscinski's ability not only to report on war, but to capture the humanity of the people involved. He is in this way an anthropologist as much a journalist. True, this book covers extensive topic matter: Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Algeria, Congo, Burundi, Cyprus, etc, but Kapuscinki's voice is powerful enough to unify these seemingly disparate stories.
   If you are curious about world history, if you want a humanistic and first-hand view of events that have shaped our world today, this is your book. There were times when I was literally on the edge of my seat wondering if Kapuscinski would make it out alive. Of course, we know he did because he pubished a book about these experiences.
   
   Visit my blog: http://www.writingup.com/blog/namingame



4. It is a striking book. Mr. Kapuscinski is a great writer and the narrative is simply wonderful.
   
   It is a great account of the cold war, as fought in Africa and Latin America.



5. This is very worthwhile reading for residents of North America or Europe to gain a better understanding of conflict and politics in other parts of the world, even if it dates back to the 1960s and 70s. Kapuscinski describes events and situations that most of us will never experience, fortunately. His style is direct, immediate, sometimes blunt, but especially effective in conveying what war is like on the ground. He was an "official" journalist for a Communist country. He had the privilege of traveling abroad, but everything he wrote for publication was censored. Presumably Kapuscinski's masters wanted him to paint a picture of brave Third World peoples fighting for freedom against capitalist exploitation. But there is little or nothing here that you could call Communist propaganda. Instead it is engaging reporting of historic events in conflict zones (Africa, Central America, Syria, Cyprus) by an intelligent, humane observer who has good insights.

5 comments about The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays.

1. Ms Knapp shows a remarkable facility to delve into various aspects of life and make them fascinating for the reader. She explores twindom, eating disorders,alcoholism and relationships in addition to various other subjects, with an equal facility to expand one's understanding on these topics. She also has a a wonderful sense of humor underlying even her most serious observations. I continue to enjoy this book despite the few topics in which I have no interest.



2. Oh--how I wish she were still with us. Caroline Knapp is one of the best authors I've ever read. Humor, diversity, insight and fierce and fearless exploration of common human issues are just a few examples of what make her writing irreplaceable. Read through her book excerpts, columns and articles from newspaper and magazine in this wonderful collection. You will laugh, cry, reflect and ponder life's mysteries. Whether those mysteries be big or small makes no difference--Caroline manages to explore them all in the most meaningful and unique ways.
   If you are a woman I absolutely guarantee this book will strike a chord in you.
   If you are a fan this is simply a must-read.
   If you are just meeting her then this is the perfect first introduction to our marvelously intelligent, dearly missed, late, great Caroline Knapp.



3. Caroline Knapp died in 2002 of lung cancer at the horribly early age of 42. She was almost my exact contemporary in age. I nearly died of a diabetic coma at about the same time, so there is a weird little echo of experience and sorrow when I think about her. I was already familiar with her funny book of faux-advice, "Alice K.'s Guide To Life", but I hadn't yet read all of her really great essays that are collected in "The Merry Recluse." (The title is a state of being to which I also aspire.) She wrote all of these terrific little pieces in the 1990's when she was at the height of her powers and apparently at a level of maturity and confidence that allowed her to look back with considerable wisdom. Caroline suffered intensely earlier in her life from anorexia, depression and anxiety, alcoholism and shyness. But she writes about these with clarity, grace, much much humor and tough-mindedness. She didn't wallow in victimization like so many do; above all she wanted to understand. In the long hot summer of 2006 perhaps my current fvorite essay in this volume is "Endless (and Endless) Summer", about how much she hated summer, how she preferred autumn, and how weird she felt when she saw all the summer-adoring people around her. Believe me Caroline; you read my mind. As you did over and over again in this book, as if we were friends who never met. And I'm seriously going to miss your wonderful, tenderly witty yet serious voice.



4. Caroline Knapp's fifth memoir was published posthumously after the author died from cancer at age forty-two. The book consists of newspaper and magazine essays written over a fifteen year period. The columns are presented thematically rather than chronologically, in sections about family relationships, grief/recovery/sobriety, the state of the world, and personal reflections.
   
   Early essays discuss female friendships, girl crushes, and Knapp's relationship with her mother and father. She was a raging, active alcoholic when both passed away within a year of one another. Knapp also covers ground on two topics she's renowned for--anorexia (as described in her memoir Appetites: Why Women Want) and alcoholism (as described in Drinking: A Love Story). Her assays on recovery provide additional insight and reflection beyond what was in her other books. None of the essays were published during her active alcoholic period in the early 1990's (only one from 1989, a long essay about her eating disorder, was published prior to Knapp's sobriety).
   
   In the lighter essays, Knapp returns to the familiar subject of her dog. One October 1998 piece for the Boston Phoenix is a rebuttal to Ron Rosenbaum's New York Observer column asserting the superiority of his cat over Knapp's dog. Other essays on the state of the world cover topics ranging from Linda Tripp s betrayal of her friend Monica Lewinsky, to life as an office drone in corporate America, to home decoration. The ruminations on life are hit-or-miss, and the fluffier pieces at the end aren't written as powerfully as Knapp's solid essays on addition and relationships.
   
   If Knapp wasn't already a bestselling author of wide renown, this essay collection would be of little popular interest. The true gems are the essays which expound on the topics of her earlier works Drinking and Appetites. I recommend this book only to admirers looking for additional material from this accomplished and well-spoken woman.



5. I have read other nonfiction essays by this author. They all have been very good. I won't spoil the clincher here but I wish she had more to offer us.

5 comments about Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library Paperbacks).

1. Chambers' autobiography "Witness" had left me speechless. It was a magnificent book, but unknown in most circles. I was hungry to learn more about Chambers' own life and times. It didn't take me long to get to Tanenhaus's fine biography, which gave me an outside perspective and did not disappoint. Tanenhaus is at his most valuable recounting Chambers' post-Hiss-Case life, not covered in "Witness"; in fleshing out the HUAC cast like Nixon, Mundt and Hebert, putting their careers and ambitions into perspective; and in covering the seamier sides of Chambers' personal and family background in even greater detail than Chambers had.
   
   In "Witness", Chambers focuses on his spiritual journey, managing to keep a reader fascinated when that might easily have become eye-glazing. Tanenhaus pounds facts, availing himself of documents and accounts not available to Chambers in 1951. He remains objective about Chambers but ultimately finds little to criticize. Chambers was a man who put his career and life on the line to expose a conspiracy, as he saw it, threatening the world and eating away this nation from within. Despite circumstances strongly suggesting his veracity - would anyone throw away a lucrative career, as he did, to falsely accuse someone? - few believed him. History proved he was telling the truth - one worth hearing, since Chambers was the second-ranking U.S. man in the Communist underground espionage network.
   
   Certain striking aspects of Chambers' character emerge here, some suggested by his autobiography but better to have confirmed independently. He was one of the great intellectuals of his time, the equal of better known friends and contemporaries from his Columbia days - Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman among them. His command of languages was exceptional. (Fabulous piece of trivia: Chambers translated the novel "Bambi" from the German in the 1920s, later inspiring the Walt Disney film.) His command of the classics, ditto. This was a man who never finished college - when he died, he was enrolled in a local college attempting to finish - but who dropped Dante quotations into interviews with ham-and-egger newspaper reporters. He was one of the greatest writers Time magazine ever had, writing first-class cover stories on philosophy, religion and other intellectual pursuits beyond most journalists. I was inspired to search out an available collection of his magazine work.
   
   Chambers' continuing intellectual and political development did him credit. He became a father figure to the modern conservative movement, inspiring those like the young Bill Buckley who shaped it. But Chambers refused to follow them where his own conscience and intellect did not dictate. He wouldn't pursue a scorched earth policy against Republican moderates like Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, unlike Buckley and others, despite Chambers' personal closeness with them: Buckley had more or less rescued him from professional and financial oblivion in the 1950s. Chambers regarded the struggle against Communism as far more important than a Republican civil war over doctrinal purity. He backed Sen. Joseph McCarthy initially, but ultimately broke with him, fearing his recklessness "would lead him and us into trouble," jeopardizing the entire anti-Communist movement, Chambers wrote in declining to endorse Buckley's pro-McCarthy book.
   
   And Chambers was willing, in his later years, to seek a politics that did not rationalize away the world's woes in favor of purist conservatism. It would have been easy for a man treated like Chambers was - who had seen the blindness of liberalism up close in the 1930s and 1940s, and had felt the savagery and hypocrisy of its backlash during the Hiss case - to become more extreme in his rejection of it. But he did not. Chambers expressed, in dealings with young writers, a fascination with the Beat poets then emerging. He saw in Columbia-tied bohemians like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg a reflection of his own distant youth. Very unBuckleyesque.
   
   Tanenhaus treats the Hiss case conservatively, letting the record speak rather than relying on Chambers' detailed account of it in "Witness". Chambers drew vividly his and his wife's close relationships with Alger and Priscilla Hiss, placing it chronologically in the 1930s when it happened. In contrast, Tanenhaus's treatment of Chambers' life in the 1930s mentions Hiss only in passing. He instead takes Hiss on in the context of the hearings and trials, as the two sides jousted over whether Hiss and Chambers, from very different walks of life, knew each other at all. The question was a proxy for the greater question of espionage, although Hiss was never tried specifically for that charge. He was, however, convicted of perjury in denying he had given Chambers government documents, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
   
   It is sad we have had to wait so long to have this case studied in such fine perspective. The Hiss case put the New Deal itself on trial, asking whether its leadership was pervaded with Communists; whether those leaders had followed the Communist Party line in shaping U.S. policy; whether they had tainted American war and China policy during and after World War II. And whether liberals were either so blind to these problems or so secretly sympathetic to them as to forever render them incapable of loving and protecting their homeland as it was.



2. I grew up under the cultural shadow of Alger Hiss, stupidly thinking the term "commie" was a funny way to mock anyone concerned about the threat of Communism.
   
   But, being a victim of bad education, I knew nothing of the epic, mid-twentieth century showdown between Hiss (now known to have been a communist spy and traitor, though still, ludicrously revered as innocent by left intelligentsia) and Whittaker Chambers, the moral lodestone of the twentieth century ,who offered up his own life as a sacrifice of sorts to unmask and quell the poison tentacles of communist Russia that reached high into the U.S. Government of the New Deal era. And Chambers was not only a former communist spy himself, but a burgeoning literary icon. This is the history of a clash of ideas, submerged in the clash between two men caught up in the rush of modern history. The truth, as always, is right in front of us. Only ideological dogma can prevent one from pretending not to see it.



3. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for understanding the state of American politics, past, present and future. The inner turmoil of Whittaker Chambers is revealed to the world, leaving the reader without a shadow of a doubt as to his courage and greatness. His bitter childhood, his years as a Communist spy, his homosexual inclination, and ultimately his redemptive love for his wife and family, all lead to the climax of Chambers' courageous stance against Communism, which he wins despite all odds. This book fills in the gaps of Chambers' remarkable autobiography, "Witness," which I also recommend as essential political and moral reading.



4. Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.
   
   Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University.
   
   A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46).
   
   Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.
   
   Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him."
   
   Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."
   
   In all, Sam Tanenhaus did an excellent job using primary and secondary sources, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to write an engaging biography of Whittaker Chambers. In his book, he provides informative notes and a thorough index; all of which helped to provide readers with a better understanding of the political mood in the country at the time of the Hiss-- Chambers case. The book would have been better organized had Tanenhaus placed the Chambers Hiss relationship information in its proper chronology and not moved it from the 1930's into the Hiss trial period of the 1950's. That small criticism aside, Tanenhaus' biography of Chambers is an important scholarly work for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of CPUSA activities in U. S., the work of HUAC, and especially its star member, Richard Nixon, and the political left/right divide that was at the center of the Cold War era.
   
   As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.



5. Chambers's life is characterized by a constant effort to combine some kind of religious faith with social messianism. His trouble came from not being able to achieve what is not possible. He took in as much from Spengler's The Decline of the West as from Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, and he made a mess of them. He did not heed Jesus' words in Matthew 16:24 recommending to deny oneself first, then to pick up each one's cross and follow Him. Chambers ignored the first part. Neither did he understand what it meant by giving God what is God's and Caesar's what is Caesar's. He mingled all, he messed it all. The man had a terrible and frustrated life: full of unbridled passions, carnal as much as intellectual while a communist; and after his defection he led a resigned (to what, the author doesn't say) life, a sort of Christian mediocritas, in peace with himself, seemingly, and looking for understanding amid the new conserative movement he had inspired.
   
   I found much more interesting the first 100 pages or so that deal with his personal and family life. A more sad and frustrated life is hard to find. He found in communism that valve to let out his anger and resentment against social and personal misery. His view on life is similar to his suicidal brother, only he took it on promiscuous sex and politics. His brother took it on alcohol and finally suicide. Instead of looking at the evil around, in their family and society, a look at themselves might have induced them to start working from within.
   
   The rest of the 400+ pages is a total brick. I had to scan through the pages and so practise my fast-read technique. It is so full of irrelevant minute detail, information that the general reader cannot care for. The author does not offer a summary of a life here; he pours all his data collected as a lawyer would. Browsable but not enjoyable.

No comments about Fukuzawa Yukichi: From Samurai to Capitalist (Library of World Biography Series) (Library of World Biography).

1 comments about The Lady Upstairs: Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post.

1. I really enjoyed this book. Nissenson tells a fascinating story of the life of one of the most powerful women in American journalism, a woman who had a huge influence on politics in New York City and the nation. Dolly Schiff was a mover and shaker who came from a rarified, super-affluent background but became a champion of mid-century liberalism. In one well-written volume, Nissenson acquaints us with the history of New York City reform politics, the history of the Democratic party, and the history of American journalism, as well as the story of a woman who led an extraordinary life. I highly recommend this book.