PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... enthralling and riveting ... covers a lot of familiar ground, but where it is particularly thorough and revealing is when it deals with Fuchs’s youth in Germany ... Greenspan’s pages on the interrogation and the decision about what to do with Fuchs are the most complete account available, and read like a detective novel. Her prodigious research is based on many important archives located in Britain, Germany and the United States, on Fuchs family papers and the papers of major scientists ... Greenspan tries to explain Fuchs’s activities by saying that Fuchs sought \'the betterment of mankind\' — he gave atomic secrets to Moscow because \'his goal became to balance world power and to prevent nuclear blackmail.\' To some, that might make him a hero. But her own material shows this was a post facto justification. The reason Fuchs spied was simply that he was a Communist and a true believer in Stalin and the Soviet Union.
David Maraniss
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Maraniss asks, was his father indeed \'un-American\'? This book is an earnest search for the answer to that question ... On certain topics, Mr. Maraniss reveals a soft streak that allows him to go easy on communist activities ... Did anything justify Elliott’s youthful communist faith ... Why, David Maraniss asks, did his father hold onto it into the 1950s? He answers that it was his father’s \'profound dislike for right-wing anticommunists.\' He does not seem to realize that there were many left-wing and liberal anticommunists, and that one did not have to support the McCarthyites to oppose communism. There was no either-or choice that one was forced to make. Despite his sometimes sentimental leftism, David Maraniss has written a thoughtful, poignant and historically valuable story of the Red Scare of the 1950s as experienced by one American family.
Steven T. Usdin
RaveThe Wall Street JournalIn Bureau of Spies, a well-researched work of investigative history, Steven Usdin describes the espionage that was conducted in the building’s halls, bar and offices for decades. He shows how scores of \'reporters\' from foreign bureaus spied for their countries’ intelligence agencies...Sometimes unwittingly, though sometimes not, American journalists or their staff members helped foreign governments by sharing whatever inside information they had about America’s politics and policies ... Today, Mr. Usdin notes, news gathering is more decentralized, and cyberspace is a better vehicle for spreading fake news. He believes that the current danger is the undermining of our confidence in the news media altogether, leading people to believe that \'there is no such thing as truth.\'
