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Average customer rating:

Terrific idea, disappointing implementation
Great Book. Worth the money
Great twist on a old classic!
Great twist on Alice in Wonderland tale
A Good Story

The Looking Glass Wars
Frank Beddor
Manufacturer: Dial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Endymion Spring
Seeing Redd
Peter Pan in Scarlet
Miracle on 49th Street
Fairest

ASIN: B000NA1XRG

Book Description

The Myth: Alice was an ordinary girl who stepped through the looking glass and entered a fairy-tale world invented by Lewis Carroll in his famous storybook. The Truth: Wonderland is real. Alyss Heart is the heir to the throne, until her murderous aunt Redd steals the crown and kills Alyss' parents. To escape Redd, Alyss and her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, must flee to our world through the Pool of Tears. But in the pool Alyss and Hatter are separated. Lost and alone in Victorian London, Alyss is befriended by an aspiring author to whom she tells the violent, heartbreaking story of her young life. Yet he gets the story all wrong. Hatter Madigan knows the truth only too well, and he is searching every corner of our world to find the lost princess and return her to Wonderland so she may battle Redd for her rightful place as the Queen of Hearts.

Customer Reviews:

Terrific idea, disappointing implementation.......2007-06-23

I picked this book up off the bookshelf because it has a terrific title, and then I read the prologue and got utterly hooked by it. What an intriguing premise! I was wild with curiosity by the time I bought my copy and brought it home. I opened the book, eager to read the whole thing in one sitting and enjoy it immensely.

And then I didn't.

The characters all start out interesting, but the things that make them interesting fall flat before around the middle point of the book. For instance, the main character starts out very young, has a string of traumatic experiences, and then the book almost completely skips over the next ten years of her life (as if they were irrelevant to the story, which I don't think they should have been), bringing her back as an adult. And a bitter, unimaginative, unlikeable adult to my mind, as well.

By the end of the book, it barely held my attention at all, as I found myself predicting every single plot point, groaning at each new cliche, and staring at the book in speechlessness at its unresolved, clearly-begging-to-hook-readers-in-for-a-sequel-instead-of-bothering-to-finish-the-story ending. It felt contrived, it felt cliche, and it felt like a cop out.

Now, I say this reluctantly, because the I thought the premise behind the book was brilliant. I'm also probably prejudiced, because I hate stories where main characters spend half or more of the book angsting, instead of doing something interesting about their problems. And I'm also prejudiced against stories where I can see every plot point coming, and yet the author still builds up to them for ages as if they were real plot twists.

I'm also a very picky reader, so there are probably lots of other people out there who will love this book. I know I thought the idea behind it was magnificent, which is why I was so crushed when I found its implementation disappointing.

(Although I will add that I thought Hatter was extremely cool, and stayed so all the way through the book. Go Frank Beddor, for including him!)

Great Book. Worth the money.......2007-05-26

This is a great book. I read this book in 3 days and had trouble putting it down. I can't wait for the second book to come out soon.

Great twist on a old classic!.......2007-05-26

This book is really fun to read. It's full of mystery and advendure and you are never sure what is going to happen. Plus, there is a little bit of a love story that starts to bloom at the end and I feel that at the end of reading this book, I have to get the 2nd so that I know what has happened to all the characters. I have actually been having dreams about the book and I only dream about the good ones. It is so easy to fall in love with all of these characters. I highly recommend this book!

Great twist on Alice in Wonderland tale.......2007-05-17

Imagine that the story ALICE IN WONDERLAND was real. But the author got the story terribly wrong.

In the book THE LOOKING GLASS WARS, Alyss Heart, is heir to the Wonderland kingdom. But on her seventh birthday she is forced to flee her kingdom after a bloody coup staged by her exiled Aunt Redd. Lost and alone in Victorian London, no one believes her tales of Wonderland except the author Lewis Carroll. She trusts him with her story, hoping that someone, somewhere will find her and take her back home. But Carroll got the story all wrong. If not for the Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan's nonstop search, she might have ended up a princes wife and never returning to fight her Aunt Redd for her rightful place as Queen of Hearts.

I loved this story. At first, I thought this would be yet another attempt to rewrite a classic tale. Boy, was I wrong! I was glued to the first page-- a prologue that actual works! If you've read ALICE IN WONDERLAND before, it's fun to see what the true characters really were like in Alyss's world.

This is the first book of a trilogy. The author, Frank Beddor, does a great job of setting up the ending of the story for book two. What really happens to evil Aunt Redd? Will Alyss and Dodge overcome their backgrounds and remember the love they had as children grow into something more?( Oh, I hope so!)

A Good Story.......2007-05-17

I listened to the book on audio CD, which was read by Gerard Doyle. I thought it was very well read, and a good story that kept you engaged the whole time. The CD is well worth the $11 its selling for.

I can't help but say there were a couple things I wished about the book that perhaps might have made it more of a classic to me. First of all, it was a bit hard latching on and getting involved at the beginning.
If the book were written as is, but started first with Alice in the real world, with things I could identify with more, it probably would have been a lot more suspenseful to me. Is Alice (Alyss)? just crazy, or is there really a Wonderland? What is all this she talking about?? That would have added a real twist when she fell in the puddle and suddenly it was all actually a real place.

Secondly there are a few things that are a bit hard to understand. What exactly is the role of the Lord and Ladies of Clubs, Diamonds, etc. Do they have powers too? Is there a 'Diamond Crystal' somewhere?
What other limitations are there on imagining things? If Alice and the Red Queen have these unlimited powers, doesn't it kind of make everyone else in the book unnecessary? It's a bit open ended there.

But who am I to complain? I heard it is actually a trilogy. I look forward to the sequels.

Average customer rating:

Good Early LeCarre
A profound anatomy of moral deterioration
You'll Like it if You Like John le Carre
Running an Agent in the "East"
Driftwood on the Sea of Life

The Looking Glass War
John le Carre
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

A Small Town in Germany
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
Call for the Dead
A Murder of Quality
The Honourable Schoolboy

ASIN: 0743431707

Book Description

John le Carré's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

THE LOOKING GLASS WAR

Once upon a time the distinction had been clear: the Circus handled all things political while the Department dealt with matters military. But over the years, power shifted and the Circus elbowed the Department out. Now, suddenly, the Department has a job on its hands. Evidence suggests Soviet missiles are being positioned close to the German border. Vital film is missing and a courier is dead. Lacking active agents, but possessed of an outdated mandate to proceed, the Department has to find an old hand to prove its mettle. Fred Leiser, German-speaking Pole turned Englishman -- once a qualified radio operator, now involved in the motor trade -- must be called back to the colors and sent East....

Customer Reviews:

Good Early LeCarre.......2007-05-27

"The Looking Glass War," published in 1965, was British spymaster John LeCarre's fourth published novel, coming right after "A Call for the Dead," "A Murder of Quality," and, the big one, "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold." It's thus an early work of the many-times published, now famous Le Carre, but it gives us many themes his work will revisit.

To begin with, it's set, operationally, in the author's German-speaking comfort zone, east of the Berlin wall. It may make the earliest mention of "Belgravia Cockney," an upper-class drawl, favored by the intelligence community, that resembles the lower class's speech; it will reappear in almost every book. It opens with a riveting set piece, and closes with another; the creation of these set pieces is certainly one of Le Carre's great abilities. It shows us some of the author's great spycraft knowledge; his care at weaving complex plots, though this early work's is much thinner than his later ones; his powerful descriptive writing, and ability to envision many interesting characters and give them enjoyable dialogue. It will introduce and reintroduce some of LeCarre's best known characters: George Smiley, Peter Guillam, his lieutenant; even Alec Leamas, who was "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold--" we're told he's dead.

Its plot is set in what will become familiar Le Carre territory. A small British Intelligence agency, whose brief is strictly military matters, suddenly has reason to believe the Russians are placing missiles in East Germany: remember the Cuba missile crisis?

This small agency has been years fighting, and losing, a turf war for power with LeCarre's vaunted circus, the intelligence agency supreme. LeClerq, head of the smaller agency, is no match for the wily Control, nor for his lieutenant Smiley, already introduced in "Call for the Dead," and "Spy Who Came In From The Cold," and destined, as all LeCarre fans know, for an illustrious career.

LeClerc's people have inadequate spycraft, as all frequent LeCarre readers will recognize; they are dependent upon World War II technology. Other men will suffer and die for this agency head's anxiety to aggrandize his agency in its political war with its sister agency. Control and Smiley won't have to do much, either; just withhold a few new toys. So its vintage LeCarre territory: the men in the field are more victimized by fighting Whitehall mandarins than by the enemy. LeClerq will first send in Taylor, a man who's been in overt services all his life and not prepared for the covert side. He'll then suddenly reactivate and send in the unfortunate Polish refugee Fred Leiser, who worked for the agency during World War II: Leiser is much too old for the mission, and woefully underprepared and under-equipped.

About that title: "looking glass" is English-speak for the American mirror. Remember that immortal Marx Brothers' scene: Groucho and Harpo before the mirror-- or is it plain clear glass?

A profound anatomy of moral deterioration.......2007-03-24

As a complete book, "The Looking Glass War" isn't perhaps one of Le Carre's crowning achievements. But in its specific anatomy of the human deterioration, moral depravity and sometimes inhumanness of the cold war it is one of his deepest studies. If "The Spy who came out from the Cold" and "Smiley's People" are symphonies, then this is a tight piece of chamber music. It could have been tighter -- cutting off about a forth of the book would have improved it -- but it offers a hermetic, very troubling experience. It is less about suspense and action and more about relations, morality and compassion. For my part, it is the one book of Le Carre's that remained with me and troubled me the longest. If you liked the more serious aspects of Le Carre's work, then this one will engage you. If you enjoy his work mostly for the action and suspense, however, this one may come on as a little tedious.

Albeit a cameo by Smiley (in one of his least attractive moments), the characters are mostly new. The plot itself is simple: a small, practically defunct British spy agency with a mandate for military targets that has been lagging on aimlessly since WWII, gets one more shot at mounting an intelligence operation. WWII was their best of times, the source of their pride and nostalgia: since then, stripped from financing, backwards on technology, they are no more than a bureaucratic specter. But the gods of warfare reward their zealots, and out of the blue, the agency is offered to retrieve some crucial information about military installations beyond the iron wall (I'll be stingy with details so as not to spoil too much). Everybody wakes up. As they do not have even a single operational agent (nor a radio, weapons, vehicles etc.), they must recruit one, hastily train and employ him; but they need to constantly lie to him, else he might realize how reduced they have become. The relations between the agency's personnel -- the washed-out old hand, the eager young assistant, the ambitious chief -- and the agent, Leiser (codename Mayfly) is what the book is mostly about.
Le Carre, of course, never quite revels to us why Leiser accepts his role (it was mostly a mistake to be heavy-handed about that, as in the subpar "The Night Manager.") Little by little, hints are dropped. A naturalized Pole, dapper, womanizer, Leiser is in fact in desperate need of discipline in his life. An extremely lonely man, the small circle of old-hand spymasters around him supply him with a sense of belonging, friendship, perhaps even love (at a certain point, young Avery realizes that he is being played by his superiors quite as Leiser is. His job is to have Leiser like, possibly love him; and he does.) One of the more pathetic portions of the book is the 48-hours leave that Leiser is granted during his training. While all are certain that this "ladies' man" is having the time of his life, he in fact roams London streets aimlessly, dissipating the time until he can return to the ad-hoc training facility (a house in Oxford rented for one month). What Leiser otherwise wants, is to be thoroughly English. He is insulted to the extent of rage when his colloquialisms are corrected by the jolly but insensitive cockney radio trainer, Johnson. He craves Englishness. It is something I wholly do not understand myself, but Le Carre is effective in convincing us that such a passion exists. It is beyond merely belonging, it is becoming.
So much is Leiser involved in his new life, that his common sense does not reveal to him the amateur nature of the preparations. The radio technology he is expected to use is outdated, cumbersome and easy to intercept; there is no clear plan of action, really, except for getting him in; certainly no one gives serious thought how to get him out. The readers suspect this since a totally mundane assignment that Avery embarked on earlier, which was botched for lack of preparation and professionalism, is praised by his superiors as a success; so utterly afraid of facing their own incompetence they have lost that all-important ability of learning from mistakes.
The Circus, their rival agency where Smiley works, of course realizes this. firmly in the grasp of Control, with Smiley as his lieutenant and sometimes conscience, the Circus observes and keeps its distance (in terms of Le Carre continuity, the story takes place in the mid-sixties, before Smiley's first retirement). However, neither Control nor Smiley will deny the specter team the rope that they require to hang their own agent when everything, of course --
[SPOILER ALERT BEGINS!] --
goes wrong.
There is one point in the book where all of a sudden things turn serious: as Leiser crosses the border (burdened by an old 50-pound radio unit in a suitcase) he quietly and efficiently kills a sentry with a knife. All of a sudden we realize that, his inadequate training notwithstanding, this is a resourceful, dangerous man. This action, however, turns out to be a damning mistake (but why not commit mistakes in contingencies against which he was neither warned nor prepared for?) -- and it is not the last. In fact, in view of the sloppy preparation, Leiser goes much further than one might expect. Still, this is not very far. At that point enters Smiley, gently hinting that the entire operation was redundant, and could and should have been avoided.
This is where Smiley's (as well as the others', save Avery) coldbloodiness plays out: even when it is clear that the operation must be aborted, there is no reason to "play by the war rules" as Lecher "proudly" declares (what a pathetic figure he is reduced to in that scene). For, even if they must relinquish Leiser and abort the operation, they can still give him a head start and a fighting chance to escape. The reason is that the only way that the East-Germans can locate him is through his radio transmissions. Every transmission begins with a brief exchange of identification call signals. At that point, they can signal him to abort transmitting, dump the radio set and attempt to get away. But they don't: when Leiser begins his transmission, there is no one on the other side to receive them. They don't just "disown" him, in Smiley's whitewashed language. They are abandoning him to die when they can still do something for him. He simply doesn't matter anymore, since "we play by the war rules."
[END SPOILER]

This is a book about how people who were once decent and resourceful have deteriorated into coldbloodiness, sheer ambition and becoming all-out technicians who inoculate themselves against the moral implications of their actions. It goes beyond the manipulations that Smiley performs in "The Spy who came out from the Cold." Albeit thin on the action and at times redundant and tedious on the narrative, this is one of Le Carre's most profound studies of the human condition.

You'll Like it if You Like John le Carre.......2006-09-20

If you are a le Carre fan, read it. It is a good book, and much better than some spy novels, but not the best of le Carre.

Running an Agent in the "East".......2005-11-28

Among other things, the description of running an Agent (Fred Leiser) through the Iron Curtain at night remains one of the best I've seen.

On a larger scale, this is a story of the mounting bureaucratic infighting between a military intelligence operation and the emergent power of the "Circus", Control and George Smiley. Like most good LeCarre novels it is also a story of more primal human emotions and their impact, in this case, on espionage operations. Very much worth the read.

Driftwood on the Sea of Life.......2005-02-07

John Le Carré writes in the same vein time and time again. This does not mean he is repeating himself or his stories are boring, just a bit predictable. He does take and show the spy world at it's worst, but he also gives you the sense of how hard it is to know the difference between good and evil in this special world. This is an old story that is outdated, but that does not make the spy world any different today than then.

Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy

Average customer rating:

Why Did He Lie?
Hiss's Betrayal, espionage, and fight for vindication
Alger Hiss is laughing last, again!
A Very Timely Book
An Excellent Historical Work

Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy
G. Edward White
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library Paperbacks)
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ASIN: 0195153456

Book Description

For decades, a great number of Americans saw Alger Hiss as an innocent victim of McCarthyism--a distinguished diplomat railroaded by an ambitious Richard Nixon. And even as the case against Hiss grew over time, his dignified demeanor helped create an aura of innocence that outshone the facts in many minds. Now G. Edward White deftly draws together the countless details of Hiss's life--from his upper middle-class childhood in Baltimore and his brilliant success at Harvard to his later career as a self-made martyr to McCarthyism--to paint a fascinating portrait of a man whose life was devoted to perpetuating a lie. White catalogs the evidence that proved Hiss's guilt, from Whittaker Chambers's famous testimony, to copies of State Department documents typed on Hiss's typewriter, to Allen Weinstein's groundbreaking investigation in the 1970s. The author then explores the central conundrums of Hiss's life: Why did this talented lawyer become a Communist and a Soviet spy? Why did he devote so much of his life to an extensive public campaign to deny his espionage? And how, without producing any new evidence, did he convince many people that he was innocent? White offers a compelling analysis of Hiss's behavior in the face of growing evidence of his guilt, revealing how this behavior fit into an ongoing pattern of denial and duplicity in his life. The story of Alger Hiss is in part a reflection of Cold War America--a time of ideological passions, partisan battles, and secret lives. It is also a story that transcends a particular historical era--a story about individuals who choose to engage in espionage for foreign powers and the secret worlds they choose to conceal. In White's skilled hands, the life of Alger Hiss comes to illuminate both of those themes.

Customer Reviews:

Why Did He Lie?.......2006-12-22

Those who believe that that human understanding progresses over time may take comfort in the fact that for all but the most ideologically besotted and intellectually corrupt the question of Alger Hiss's guilt is no longer of much interest. For G.E. White, the Traitor Hiss was self-evidently just that and the real issue instead: why did he lie, lie for 40 years after his conviction and imprisonment for perjury, lie to his supporters, lie to his friends and, most of all, lie to and thereby debauch his own son, enlisting filial devotion in his selfish and ultimately futile quest for a thoroughly underserved vindication? White, the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, organizes his study around these psychological questions, but also he supplies an admirably concise review of the Hiss case, and, most importantly, describes the intellectual climate in which the traitor and his allies succeeded for a time in muddying the historical waters, not least for a younger generation of Americans raised on tales of America's Cold War perfidy.

Alger Hiss, for those schooled after the Vietnam War persuaded much of the American Left that anti-Communism merely licensed McCarthyite hunter-gatherers to trample civil rights and cut doe-eyed New Dealers from the pack, transcended relatively humble origins to fashion an identity as a rising star of the old Eastern Establishment. As Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston and New York attorney, and Agriculture Department price regulator, Hiss cultivated the erect posture, firm handshake and sincere bearing that carried him to the Department of State, where he again rose through the ranks, numbering among his friends future Secretaries of State Edward Stettinius and Dean Acheson, attended the Yalta Conference, then presided over the San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, then as now the collective repository for mugwumpish internationalist idealism.

Hiss also was a Soviet agent, and eventually was fingered as such by former Party operative Whittaker Chambers. Chambers was portly, religious, dentally challenged--- hardly the sort for whom John Foster Dulles would arrange, as he did for Hiss, a golden parachute at the Carnegie Endowment when Alger's State Department career dimmed. But Chambers had stashed away typewritten copies of purloined State Department documents, as insurance against retribution when he broke with the Party. Those copies, the FBI concluded, had been typed
on the Hiss family typewriter. A perjury conviction and 44 month jail sentence followed, after which, in 1954, Alger Hiss began his life-long campaign to re-write the history books.

White's calls this campaign Hiss's `looking-glass wars.' A natural spy, Hiss "appears to have taken pleasure in the pursuit of covert goals and in the creation of devices to shield that pursuit from others." His strategy was to cultivate a persona of temperate reasonableness; in other words to convince others that "he was not the sort of person who could conceivably have such secrets." White traces this theme through four phases of Hiss's life: his Supreme Court Clerkship, when he dissembled his way past Justice Holmes' mandate that clerks remain unmarried during their term of employment; his `pillar of the establishment' defense to Chambers' charges; his term in Lewisburg federal penitentiary, where Hiss gradually earned the respect of his fellow prisoners; and finally, the serene countenance he subsequently presented, an invitation to all who gazed upon it to conclude that a man so at peace with himself (so different in this respect than his two principal tormenters: the at-times suicidal Chambers and the tenebrific Nixon) surely was innocent.

To the extent that internal peacefulness was genuine, its true source was of course Hiss' ideological commitment to Communism and political loyalty to the Soviet Union. A traitor to the end of his days, Hiss adhered to the standard Moscow demanded of all its agents: if exposed, deny; if convicted, maintain innocence all your life. Thus, while White is persuasive on the tactics of Hiss's campaign, the most interesting parts of his book explain instead how Hiss persuaded so many of his innocence in the face of mounting evidence from U.S. and Soviet archives to the contrary. The Hiss defense, it helps to recall, amounted to the assertion that Hiss was more credible than Chambers, toward whom the Hiss forces directed a notably vigorous whispering campaign alleging among other things Chambers' homosexuality, coupled with the lame hypothesis that it was all a set-up, involving the FBI and assorted other baddies (one that rather improbably required a duplicate typewriter and a decade-long conspiracy, all to frame one self-important mid-level official). Given the weakness of Hiss's case, the thorough and damning 1978 study by Allen Weinstein (appointed Archivist of the United States by President Bush in the face of an ad hominem attack not unlike the one Hiss's allies launched against Chambers), the documents that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union and finally the release of the "Venona Papers," transcripts of coded Soviet transmissions deciphered by the National Security Agency, all of which supported Chambers' allegations, the question remains: how could any one have been taken in?

As Hiss recognized from the very first, he at least was fortunate in his enemies. Chambers was a quixotic character, and his supporter was the Prince of Darkness himself. A Democrat congressional staffer once remarked "I don't think we can clearly nail Nixon as a liar, although he undoubtedly is one, in this instance, as in all others." Given the sheer venom that much of what we today call "Blue" America directed at Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and their ilk, Hiss shrewdly positioned himself as one of their many victims: were his accusers' reputations to suffer, ideally for misconduct toward real victims, Hiss would benefit. By depicting himself as the victim par excellence of rabid anti-Communism, Hiss similarly reaped the post-Vietnam rewards when American liberalism, with a few honorable exceptions, went AWOL for the balance of the Cold War.

By draping his cause in ideological standards, Hiss freed his supporters from contesting the still unfriendly facts of the case. And there should be no doubt that those supporters cared about defending Soviet Marxism and not the truth. When Allen Weinstein began work on Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, he was somewhat sympathetic to Hiss and expected to argue for his innocence. When the evidence persuaded Weinstein otherwise, friends of Hiss regretted bitterly their decision to cooperate with the project. "Weinstein came to see me under false colors," said one, "I never would have said a word to him if I'd known he was friendly to Chambers." Another announced tartly that the purpose of his assistance was "to prove that Alger was framed and a victim of McCarthyism. Otherwise, I was given a bum steer and my time and trouble was for nothing."

Hiss's campaign sought far more than his personal vindication. Were he to persuade Americans that prosecution of a Communist and genuine traitor was instead anti-Communist persecution of a liberal New Dealer, he would discredit anti-Communism as fundamentally illiberal and serve his Soviet masters even beyond their own ignominious demise. Among the segments of American society most susceptible to this anti-anti-Communism were the academy and the liberal media. While White does not address the former, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage more than amply plumbs how some American historians continue to prostitute themselves, debase their profession, and sully the cause of truth, the better to brand opponents of social collectivism as "McCarthyites" and worse.

White devotes considerable attention to "mainstream" media coverage of Hiss, contrasting nicely PBS's 1983 Hiss-friendly American Playhouse offering with the Reagan Administration's
decision to award the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Whittaker Chambers. Still worse was the Pavlovian response to the 1992 Volkogonov incident. In that year, Hiss cleverly wrote a number of Russian officials, asking that they attest he had never served the Soviet Union. One, the historian and former General Dimitri Volkogonov, on the basis of a mere two days research in the KGB archives (Hiss had spied for Soviet military intelligence, not the KGB) and after some prodding by a Hiss confederate issued the desired clean bill of health, which Hiss's allies released to the press on October 29.

With the publication of Volkogonov's letter, the liberal media was quick to trumpet Hiss's triumph. All three "major" television networks reported the story that very evening and CBS followed the next morning with the assertion that Hiss had been "apparently exonerated." "Hiss never spied," added USA Today while Newsweek announced the "bittersweet vindication." CNN aired a commentary asking why the U.S. government had not yet exonerated Hiss. The New Yorker afforded Tony Hiss a platform for "My Father's Honor," and, least surprising of all, National Public Radio reached into its stable of "experts," finding one who duly confirmed that the "vindication" of Hiss revealed the excesses of anti-Communism.

Unfortunately for the media pack, it only took a few weeks for Volkogonov to issue a damning retraction. "What I saw gives no basis to claim a full clarification," he wrote on November 24. His motives for writing the letter had been "primarily humanitarian" and an accommodation to Hiss's agent, who argued that Hiss "wanted to die peacefully" and "pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced." None of the television networks that reported Volkogonov's first letter, White observes, ever covered the retraction. No newspaper mentioned the retraction until December 17. As late as December 13, The New York Times still reported that Volkogonov had exonerated Hiss and that Chambers had never been a Soviet agent. The Palme d'Or, though, must be reserved for Peter Jennings, favorite news mannequin of Americans who otherwise take their news from the BBC. On Hiss's death in 1996, Jennings reported: "Hiss... protested his innocence until the very end.... And last year, we reported that the Russian president Boris Yeltsin said that KGB files had supported Mr. Hiss's claim."

Alger Hiss had the good sense to pass away just before the floodgates opened. In 1997, Allen Weinstein published the second edition of Perjury, grounded in primary research in the Comintern archives, and a subsequent analysis of KGB files. By 1999, these and the aforementioned VENONA transcripts had put paid to all but the most slippery claims for Hiss's innocence.

Even so, the name Alger Hiss retains enormous significance. Stripped of any respectable claim to innocence, Hiss remains a useful tool for those who would discredit his opponents--- not for accusing an innocent man but for defending freedom from a murderous ideology and the United States from an aggressive totalitarian adversary. For this reason their successors--- academic fellow travelers and media dupes--- seek to muddy the historical waters. We must not let them.

Hiss's Betrayal, espionage, and fight for vindication.......2005-07-07

With the release of declassified materials in Russia and the United States, there is no doubt that Alger Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy. However, Mr. White goes beyond the evident conclusion of Hiss's guilt and explores the convict's tireless campaign for vindication. Since others have posted review links at this site, I would reccomend that readers consult Dr. Stanley Kutler's review at: http://www.hnn.us/blogs/entries/7050.html

Dr. Kutler, one of the foremost historians of our time and hardly a rabid conservative(infact Ann Coulter calls him the "liberal luminary."), provides the best scholarly review of "Looking Glass Wars." He also makes an important point:

"The mystery White adeptly explores is why some liberals persisted in reacting so defensively and for so long - especially when the result was to hand a victory to the opportunistic characters who went beyond Hiss's particular guilt to indict and convict a generation of New Dealers and liberals. A rotten apple did not spoil the barrel; liberals and leftists could and should have conceded Hiss's guilt; instead, they harmed their own credibility by maintaining his innocence."

What if Truman and Acheson had not foolishly defended Hiss? Would there have been a McCarthy era? Would Truman have had more bi-partisan support in shaping his foreign policy? We will never know because Truman and many New-Dealers ruined their credibility be defending a Soviet spy that would end up having a damaging effect on the U.S. for fifty years.

Excellent book...highly reccomended

Alger Hiss is laughing last, again!.......2004-11-18

Historian Jeff Kisseloff has written an excellent debunking of G. Edward White's poorly researched and argued book on Alger Hiss. It can be found at this link: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/wars.html. To summarize:

* White never bothers to re-investigate the case, and substitutes a re-indictment for a re-trial. He presents only the evidence for the prosecution, and omits the defense. White has looked nowhere for new facts, and has instead been content to reassemble and rearrange from secondary sources all the accusations previously leveled at Hiss. His retelling of the case against Alger Hiss is a stripped-down model, thoroughly cleansed of complexity, and dismissive of any materials that might exonerate Alger Hiss. Factual errors, errors of omission, and errors of interpretation abound in the book.

* White (without the benefit of a certificate in psychoanalysis) devotes the bulk of his book to constructing a psychological profile of Hiss. White, who never met or spoke to Hiss, made no attempt to get in touch with anyone who knew Hiss well, such as his son or stepson. Hiss's lifelong quest for vindication, in this reading, somehow becomes further evidence of his guilt.

* U.S. government documents summarizing the substance of many of Chambers' interviews have been released. They contain numerous contradictions and demonstrably false allegations, so many in fact that even the FBI questioned Chambers' credibility. Hardly any of these issues, however, are examined by White.

* Regarding the search for the Woodstock typewriter, White claims that the defense didn't want it to be found. Instead of damaging Hiss's credibility, however, defense files actually support his story - consistently. Defense file documents suggested investigators check on a number of places where it might be found.

* White repeats Chambers' claim that Hiss had been a member of the underground organization the Ware Group. But while White points out that Hiss's former colleague, Lee Pressman, was an admitted member of the group, he omits Pressman's testimony before HUAC that Hiss was never a member. Two other admitted Ware group members, John Abt and Nathan Witt, said that Chambers both exaggerated the scope of the Ware group and also his own relationship with it.

* In 1992, Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov stated that he had examined govt. archives in Moscow and determined that Hiss had never been an agent of the USSR. White erroneously claims that Volkogonov later "retracted" his statement, acknowledging that he had spent only two days looking in the KGB archive. White misrepresents both Volkogonov's research and his subsequent clarification for the press. In a follow-up interview Volkogonov was specifically asked whether he had looked through military intelligence files. Volkogonov responded, "Yes, we also asked to examine the military intelligence files and there, too, no traces of Alger Hiss have been found." Some months before the publication of "Looking-Glass Wars" - in time for White to include the information in his book, had he chosen to do so - General Julius Kobyakov, a retired Russian intelligence official, revealed that he had been the person who actually searched the files for General Volkogonov. Kobyakov in his postings said that he prepared his 1992 report that there was no indication that Alger Hiss had been either a paid or unpaid agent of the Soviet Union only "after careful study" of KGB archives and "after querying sister services" (military intelligence).

A Very Timely Book.......2004-06-24

Everyone should read the devastating Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars and ponder its implications. White does not waste our time speculating about Hiss's guilt or innocence; Hiss, it is now as firmly established as it seems possible to establish, was guilty. Instead, White concentrates our attention on the implications of Alger Hiss and his saga that are of profound and timeless importance.

First, there are human beings who live among us with no conscience and who are utterly devoid of morality. Not everyone has something good and decent about them. And such people are not limited to the dictators, murderers, and rapists. Alger Hiss lied brazenly, publicly, and repeatedly, and as a matter of course over nearly 60 years, he took shameless advantage of the trust and affection of his countrymen, his friends, his co-workers, and his family. He was a thoroughly evil man.

Second, liberal institutions - academia and the media - have become purposefully blind to the mendacity and depravity of anyone deemed to be a friend to liberal causes (or an enemy to conservative causes). The extent to which such institutions go to re-write history and manipulate public perceptions of such cases has become bold and radical. Hiss represented a pinnacle of these efforts, as his reputation was resurrected by the time of his death - with, as White points out, not a shred of exculpatory evidence. Only the irrefutable evidence of his un-encoded name discovered posthumously in the Soviet GRU archives ended the charade for most, but not all (e.g., Bard College), of his defenders. And, as is becoming routine, our liberal institutions betray no remorse, no shame, and no soul-searching for having been so wrong and having contributed to such deceit.

And so, the cycle repeats itself. Before his name was uncovered in the GRU archives, Alger Hiss was the noble victim of a psychologically imbalanced accuser, Whitaker Chambers, and an out-of-control and paranoid right-wing prosecutor, Richard Nixon. Before the blue dress, President Clinton was the noble victim of a psychologically imbalanced accuser, Monica Lewinsky, and an out-of-control and paranoid right-wing prosecutor, Kenneth Starr. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

While not suggesting anything about President Clinton, Amazon should offer Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars in tandem with his My Life.

An Excellent Historical Work.......2004-06-02

This is one the best books ever written about the treason case of Alger Hiss. It is also the one that does the best job of explaining just what Hiss's motives were. According to White, Hiss had an incredible knack for manipulating people and took huge risks and literally thrived on living on the edge. In other words, Hiss's espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union was motivated as much by the thrilling experience of being a spy as much as any ideological sympathies that he may have had for Communism.

Book Description

This is the story behind a sensational historical controversy - the allegation that, in forcibly handing over 70,000 Cossacks and Yugoslavs to be massacred by the Communists in the summer of 1945, the British army in Austria, guided by a "conspiracy" involving Harold Macmillan, was party to a major "war crime". When these charges were first made they were widely accepted, not least by the BBC which broadcast no fewer than nine documentaries on the handovers. In 1989 the controversy culminated in a High Court action, in which Lord Aldington was awarded the highest libel damages in British legal history. This book also tells the extraordinary story of how an exhaustive investigation into the events of 1945 finally revealed just how all those previously-published accounts had turned history upside down. What happened in Austria was tragic. But there was no conspiracy. Macmillan's role was irrelevant. Many "massacres" described in lurid detail never took place. As Booker describes how the story of the repatriations came to be presented in such a distorted fashion, his book turns into a study of people's willingness to cling on to a "make believe" version of history, even when all the facts have proved it wrong.

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Awesome Read!!

Looking Through Leopard Print Glasses
Tracy Walraven
Manufacturer: Authorhouse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1410769755

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Awesome Read!!.......2003-09-12

I could not put this book down! It's the best!!!! I read a lot of books (mostly fiction) and have never read a book like this one. I reccomend it to any fun, smart girl!!!! It has a wild twist in the end that you have to find out about.
I want MORE!!!

The spy who came in from the cold : Call for the dead ; A murder of quality ; The looking-glass war ; A small town in Germany

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The spy who came in from the cold : Call for the dead ; A murder of quality ; The looking-glass war ; A small town in Germany
John Le Carre
Manufacturer: Heinemann/Octopus
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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