Word: hissing
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...Like the Hiss case itself, Witness, by Whittaker Chambers (TIME, May 26), had a troubling effect on Americans. Few books in a dozen years have provoked such a burst of prompt, wide and heart-searching reviews. Verdicts have come not only from the professional book reviewers but from philosophers, historians and freelance intellectuals. They compared Whittaker Chambers (favorably or unfavorably) to St. Augustine, Rousseau, Casanova, Lincoln Steffens, Ulysses S. Grant, Lanny Budd. Adjectives chased one another across the pages: "terrible," "penetrating," "poignant," "unbelievable," "great," "boring," "thrilling," "overwritten," "embarrassing," "fascinating." Whatever their outlook, almost all reviewers agreed that the book...
...Charles Alan Wright, University of Minnesota law professor, Saturday Review: "I think Hiss is innocent . . . Mr. Chambers is the author of one of the longest works of fiction of the year . . ." Cf Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Saturday Review: "Whittaker Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies. [The book] is written with intensity-with an unAmerican, I was about to say, or at least un-Anglo-Saxon intensity . . . Chambers is a figure out of Dostoevsky, not out of William Dean Howells . . . When Mr. Chambers demands belief in God as the first credential, he is surely skating near the edge...
...John Cogley, the Commonweal: "Moral relativism, pragmatism, raw secularism -all the timid forebears of the giant Marxism-stood before the bar with Hiss. It was not only a generation that was on trial, as Mr. Alistair Cooke put it; it was also the vision of good without...
...Rebecca West, the Atlantic: "[The Hiss trial] was yet another dervish trial . . . In they rush, and the examination of witnesses can hardly be carried on because of the commotion caused by the invaders, twirling and turning all over the courtroom, and the lawyers' speeches are not to be heard because of their holy bowlings . . . The mystic may be discomposed by the howling and gyrating of the dervishes [but] he leans on his understanding with God . . . To reach the state of intense perception which makes a mystic, a man must be unselfish but egotistical. He must be supremely interested...
Acute followers of the Hiss trials claim that on several occasions in Witness, Chambers' story has changed from what it was in the courtroom. But then about the only aspect of Witness that is not likely to be argued is that it is exciting, provoking, and intensely readable. RUDOLPH KASS