SOURCE: Review of Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Correspondence, 1949-1960, by Whittaker Chambers. Kirkus Reviews 65, no. 18 (15 September 1997): 1431.

In the following review, the critic provides a favorable assessment of Notes from the Underground.

[Notes from the Underground] is an intriguing and illuminating correspondence between two of America's earliest cold warriors.

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers (himself a former Communist agent then employed as a senior editor at Time magazine) exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. At no small cost, he made his accusation stick, and the liberal poster boy eventually served five years in a federal penitentiary on perjury charges. In the meantime, Manhattan-based de Toledano (then a Newsweek reporter) became a trusted friend of the wary Chambers, who had retreated to a working farm he owned in Maryland. The two soon began writing each other with some regularity, and their letters offer the hair-down commentary...