The view from Alger's window

the long version

Using his father's letters from prison - three a week, two pages long, were allowed - and other family letters never before made public, as well as the recollections of friends and relatives, Tony Hiss moves back and forth in time to tell the story of Alger Hiss's life, and of his own experience as a young boy swept up in the turmoil of the trial that signaled the opening of the Cold War. For the first time we meet the man his family and friends knew as warm and witty, honest to a fault, intellectually searching, and enormously giving to those he loved. For the first time, too, we hear from Alger's stepson, Timothy Holsson, a boy of ten in the thirties when the disputed events occurred, who tells his side of the story. Tony Hiss was just turning seven in 1948 when the charges against his father surfaced, and we see how he and his mother tried, with varying success, to cope with what was happening to them as fair-weather friends, and income, and jobs, dropped away. We also see how the friends who did remain created a protective bubble around them, enabling them to survive. And finally we learn how, almost miraculously, Alger's letters and the prison visits brought Tony and his father closer than they had ever been, and how perhaps the whole experience gave Alger Hiss a kind and common touch he had previously lacked.