SOURCE: Sobran, Joseph. “Chambers without Hiss.” National Review 41, no. 10 (2 June 1989): 48, 50.

In the following review, Sobran praises the erudition, positive tone, and diversity of the subject matter of Ghosts on the Roof.

The price of believing Alger Hiss has been to cut oneself off from Whittaker Chambers. It has never been a mere question of choosing which of two contradictory stories to accept. Siding with Hiss has always meant diminishing his accuser—reducing Chambers to something he most certainly wasn't: not only a liar, but a bore; a man with nothing to say, whose eloquence was nothing but fantastic loquacity.

In Ghosts on the Roof, we finally meet Chambers alone, without the shadow of the Hiss case, though its foreshadowing is here and there inescapable. The book is a collection of Chambers's magazine articles, written over a span of thirty years, from his early fiction in New Masses to...