Chambers, Whittaker - Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 September 1997)

Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 September 1997)

SOURCE: Review of Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Correspondence, 1949-1960, by Whittaker Chambers. Kirkus Reviews 65, no. 18 (15 September 1997): 1431.

[In the following review, the critic provides a favorable assessment of Notes from the Underground.]

[Notes from the Underground] is an intriguing and illuminating correspondence between two of America's earliest cold warriors.

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers (himself a former Communist agent then employed as a senior editor at Time magazine) exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. At no small cost, he made his accusation stick, and the liberal poster boy eventually served five years in a federal penitentiary on perjury charges. In the meantime, Manhattan-based de Toledano (then a Newsweek reporter) became a trusted friend of the wary Chambers, who had retreated to a...

[The entire page is 390 words long]

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