Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus. (New York: Random House, 1997. Pp. 638. $35.00)

Abstract

Free-lance writer Sam Tanenhaus has made an extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century American history in his stunning new biography of Whittaker Chambers. Tanenhaus combines scholastic rigidity with his eminently readable style to create a work of the highest standard of historical biography. Whittaker Chambers emerges as a complex, enigmatic figure, misunderstood by most in his own time and by his liberal critics yet today. The author is successful in understanding and intimating the complex forces that drew Chambers to, and ultimately from, communism, and eventually toward his confrontation with Alger Hiss.