Whittaker Chambers in Books

Moviefone mixes Whittaker Chambers into Hollywood’s Cold War

David Chambers — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 02:51:40 +0000

Did Whittaker Chambers suffer from a paranoid image of the Cold War?

Read comment here, which link back to Moviefone article.

Red Conspirator, by Thomas Sakmyster

David Chambers — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:30:20 +0000

From August 3, 1948, until today, America has had to wait to learn more about the head of Soviet espionage in Washington during the 1930s.

On that day, Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather) told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under subpoena…

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Chambers on Reinsch on Chambers

David Chambers — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:30:27 +0000

…I would go further. More than muffling Whittaker Chambers’s intellectual thought, Reinsch strangles it. He narrows Chambers’s vistas to his own private passion: conversion passages in Witness (page 83). Fixation aside, nothing is new… Reinsch ditches insight for personal bias.

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(Reprint from “Letters: Muffled—or Strangled?,” published in the January 2011 issue of The New Criterion)

Whittaker Chambers, by Richard Reinsch

David Chambers — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:27:57 +0000

Reinsch’s treatment falls short… Where Chambers writes with passion and palpability, Reinsch offers fuzz. His prose muffles the screams…

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Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt

David Chambers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 01:11:43 +0000

“The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s.” I knew about the 1920s from Whittaker Chambers…

> Read the full article here

Koestler, by Michael Scammell

David Chambers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 01:09:03 +0000

No book has ever explained the inner agony of devoted party members and admirers as Darkness at Noon did. Reviewing the book for TIME magazine in 1941, Whittaker Chambers wrote…

> Read the full article here

Carl Rollyson: Biography

David Chambers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:21:44 +0000

Biography requires insight, argues Dr. Carl Rollyson in his latest book… — the biographer must know the subject so well as to be able to assess the subject’s self-honesty. Rollyson discusses… Martha Gellhorn… the example, a look at Hiss Case protagonists Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss…

> Read the full article here

Alan Cowell: The Terminal Spy

David Chambers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:19:48 +0000

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…

> Read the full article here

Carolyn Heilbrun: When Men Were the Only Models We Had

David Chambers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:18:29 +0000

Heilbrun she sheds more light on Chambers and his contemporaries than many others…

> Read the full article here

Marie Brenner: Great Dames

David Chambers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:15:50 +0000

Brenner 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…

> Read the full article here