Word: algerism
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...practically the embodiment of virtue herself. A single mother on welfare when she wrote the first Potter book, she has rapidly risen to becoming the author of three New York Times bestsellers. And she's accomplished this all through her own persistence and ingenuity. Rowling is the Horatio Alger of our Gilded Age, never mind that she's from Scotland...
Heidegger was a towering philosopher but an odious man with Nazi sympathies. Whittaker Chambers was mostly right about communism and Alger Hiss, but he was a nasty piece of work and no one likes a snitch. Even Joe McCarthy may have been on to something, but he was a crude and cruel man who ruined people's lives for 48-point type. You might call this the When Bad People Spoil Good Things school of history...
...that was long ago and far away, in a country different from our own. But there is a convergence of new books on the period, with fresh deceptions and clarifying truths. Tony Hiss's The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir is a tender hagiography that makes a claim for his father's innocence--a case so heartbreakingly sweet that one struggles (though unsuccessfully) to join in the son's self-deception. William F. Buckley Jr., who as a young conservative in the 1950s was a friend to both Chambers and McCarthy, gives his version of McCarthy...
Tony Hiss, 58, still occupies the Greenwich Village apartment where he lived as a child with Alger and Priscilla Hiss. He calls it a "time funnel," a point of metaphysical access connecting present and past. Tony worked for years writing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker. He tells Alger's story as a kind of cold war fairy tale, colored by the moods of our age of therapy: Once upon a time, a boy's idealistic young father was set upon by an ogre who hid under the bridge, Whittaker Chambers (fat, neurotic, with bad teeth...
...real world," writes Hiss, "there is no way to squeeze together in one person the translucent father I got to know and the monstrous Alger that Chambers talked and wrote about." Hiss makes his case by quoting at length the lovely letters Alger wrote to him and Priscilla from the Lewisburg federal penitentiary, where he served three years and eight months in the early '50s. In effect, says Tony, the letters--gentle, loving, teasing, serene, filled with the observations of a bird watcher and stargazer--exonerate Alger. Bad things happen to good people. Alger's creed was not Marxism...