... gripping ... While there is no longer any doubt as to whether Julius Rosenberg gave U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union, Sebba makes a powerful case for Ethel’s relative innocence ... Although the subject matter is often complex, Sebba’s accessible style of writing enables the reader to grasp how two intelligent, good-hearted people could make decisions that led to their downfall. She also unequivocally exposes the malfeasance of the U.S. government with malevolent mischief-makers like Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn riding roughshod over the rights of American citizens. This superbly written facet of history is both outrageous and heartbreaking, and in the end, oddly uplifting.

Those who choose to judge this biography as the product of a writer gone soft on totalitarianism or espionage fail to grasp its true heart. Sebba makes clear her own distaste for communism, and her explicit mission is human rather than political: it is to 'extrapolate' Ethel the woman from the whole notorious, sordid story. In doing so, she brings us a woman, rather like Plath’s heroine, suffocated by the 'madness that incarcerated so many women in different ways in the early 1950s' ... Sebba has dug deep beneath this famous and archetypically male story of spying, weapons and international tensions to give us an intelligent, sensitive and absorbing account of the short, tragic life of a woman made remarkable by circumstance.

Sebba provides a compassionate account of Ethel’s character as a wife and mother, dutifully standing by her husband no matter what, and at the same time doing everything in her power to nurture her two boys, who emerged remarkably unscathed by their parents’ ordeal and who honor their parents’ memory in Sebba’s account of their lives ... In this engrossing narrative, Ethel emerges as a doctrinaire Communist, and yet the opposite of the contemporary attacks on her as an unfit mother. Ironically, Ethel conformed to the period’s American ideal of the wife and mother with fealty to her family while she was attacked for being the spy ring leader who manipulated her husband and was thus unfaithful to her role in society and her ties to her kindred.

On the question of Ethel’s guilt, Sebba, who has written many biographies of famous women, waffles and confuses, declaring at the beginning that Ethel was not 'legally complicit,' only later to write that she was, in fact, 'complicit to a conspiracy,' but then asks: 'Was that a crime?' She also points to the relevance of the Rosenberg case in demonstrating how widespread fear of foreign enemies can lead to government abuses, though she stops short of directly tying the case to recent events ... as biography the book falls short. The information to really fill out her story, to add depth and richness to her early internal struggles, is lacking. Sebba wants us to see Ethel as an extraordinary woman, but instead we feel her ordinariness.

I’ve recounted Sebba’s thesis as fairly as I can, so let me add, without heat or rancour, that it is wildly false and the book is an intellectual disgrace. The publisher bills it as an account of ;America’s Dreyfus case;, heedless that Alfred Dreyfus was framed on bogus espionage charges whereas Ethel Rosenberg was not. If the problem were merely that the book is soft on crime and soft on communism, that at least would be an arguable historical perspective; yet this notional biography fails even that test, for the Ethel Rosenberg it depicts never existed. Sebba manages to impute noble qualities to her heroine by the simple expedient of ignoring the definitive evidence that Ethel was guilty as charged ... Sebba is hazy too about the scale of the spies’ illicit activities ... Although Sebba advances the truism that in a free society 'anyone is entitled to hold whatever political beliefs they want', the Rosenbergs were not persecuted for their politics but convicted for their crimes ... Sebba’s incuriosity runs through this alternately saccharine and obtuse book, of which nothing good can be said and from which nothing but harm will arise.

... gripping ... Her anguished letters from prison about her inability to care for her two adored sons make harrowing reading, as does the state’s vindictive treatment of her children ... Sebba’s heartbreaking biography leaves little doubt that Ethel’s trial was 'tiddled with miscarriages of justice', based as it was on the false testimony of her co-accused brother David and a deadly game of realpolitik in which she was the pawn ... excellent.

Sebba’s careful reconstruction of Ethel’s early life depicts both complexity and ordinariness, while Ethel’s letters from prison reveal immense courage in the face of overwhelming suffering ... A deft, chilling, and long overdue biography of an American woman singled out by dark political and cultural forces that were bent on keeping women at home and 'foreign' ideas out of American minds.

... riveting ... fills in the blanks and proves the case ... The author’s sharp portrait of Julius is decidedly unflattering ... The author compellingly narrates Ethel's early life, the course of her relationship with the brother whose perjury sent her to the electric chair, and both her difficulties as a mother and her commitment to overcoming them. Could there be a better time to review 'what can happen when fear, a forceful and blunt weapon in the hands of authority, turns to hysteria and justice is willfully ignored'? ... A concise yet thorough account of a 1953 miscarriage of justice with alarming relevance today.

... sympathetic yet opaque ... Though the insights into Rosenberg’s family life are intriguing, she often recedes into the background and remains an enigmatic figure. Still, this is a persuasive argument that Rosenberg’s death was a tragic miscarriage of justice.