Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...monte. Americans would be at one another's throat for a half-century, sorting out which of the lies was the evil one and which was the harmless. Consider Whittaker Chambers, the aggressive apostate from Lie No. 1: Was he a malignant fabricator? Or was the real deceiver Alger Hiss, who went to his death in 1996 still proclaiming No. 2? Or was it the father of McCarthyism--drunken, reckless Tailgunner Joe, No. 3's bully and birdseed artist, who was the true Antichrist...
...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...
...SPIN When CD players first arrived in 1982, audiophiles complained that the tinny digital recordings lacked the warmth of analog LPs. Now Super Audio CD, a new format co-created by Sony and Philips, uses a simplified digitization process to put the subtlety of LP sound on clear, hiss-free compact discs. SACD debuts this month in Japan, and will go on sale in the U.S. in the fall. The true test? Whether a generation raised on Discman can tell the difference...