True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.67 (542 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1476763771 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-05-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
There are none so blind. How amazing and sad that an intelligent man who in his youth cared deeply about justice could have blinded himself to the horrible injustices of Stalin's regime. As I read the book, I thought about the young people today who justify violence and murder in the name of a religious cause that uses them as brutally as Stalin's regime used Noel Field and others. I met an older couple when I was young back in the 1960s who cheerfully justified the crushing of the Hungarian uprising as protectin. A heart felt book by a Hungarian born American Journalist Journalist Kati Marton's early life intersected with the subject of this biography when she was a child in Budapest where the Fields were in prison and later living in permanent exile. Like several of the family and associates of Noel Field, the author's parents were Hungarian journalists who were imprisoned by the Moscow puppet regime. So she is the ideal author for a biography of an American traitor. Noel Field was from a Quaker family and lived most of his life in Europe but returned t. The author's parents were Hungarian journalists who suffered imprisonment under The author's parents were Hungarian journalists who suffered imprisonment under the Commmunist regime in Hungary, so naturally they are extremely unsympathetic to Noel Field, an extremely naive American humanitarian who became a Soviet agent. As far as I can tell, during his active career he was actually spending most of his time helping Communist refugees from Franco's Spain, which I would call relatively harmless for a Stalinist.However, after World War 2 in Hungary he was tortured into
Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs and many in Field’s generation were seduced by its siren song. “Kati Marton’s True Believer is a true story of intrigue, treachery, murder, torture, fascism, and an unshakable faith in the ideals of Communism….A fresh take on espionage activities from a critical period of history” (Washington Independent Review of Books).True Believer reveals the life of Noel Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American who spied for Stalin during the 1930s and forties. Few, however, went as far as Noel Field in betraying their own country.With a reporter’s eye for detail, and a historian’s grasp of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, Kati Marton, in a “relevant…fascinating…vividly reconstructed” (The New York Times Book Review) account, captures Field’s riveting quest for a life of meaning that went horribly wrong. Later, a pawn in Stalin’s sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades.How does an Ivy League-educated, US State Department employee, deeply rooted in American culture and history, become a hardcore Stalinist? The 1930s, when Noel Field joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement, were a time of national collapse. True Believer is supported by unpr
Kati Marton has written a gripping but nuanced account of the fanaticism and betrayal by one of the most notorious American traitors in Cold War history.” (Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire)“A riveting account of how fanaticism arises, who's vulnerable to it, and why. Marton's beautiful storytelling reminds us of the America that spawned traitors. If you can understand Field, you can understand America. A one of a kind book.” (Joe Weisberg, creator and executive produ
. She lives in New York City. Kati Marton is the author of True Believer: Stalin's American Spy; Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World; Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History; Wallenberg;