"Witness" by Whittaker Chambers: A Classic Only Lately Received

I cannot express in any adequate fashion how informed, impressed and profoundly inspired I am by the book I just finished a few moments ago. It is Witness, the enormously powerful autobiography of Whittaker Chambers within which he tells in such vivid, beautiful prose the story of his past in the Communist underground, his break with that evil philosophy and its atheism, his part in the infamous Alger Hiss trials, and more.

There are only a handful of books that you know will become an important part of your spiritual strength long after your first reading of them. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky was one such book for me. So too were Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago; Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto; G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy; Wilder's play, Our Town; Lewis’ Mere Christianity; and a few others. Whittaker Chambers’ Witness now joins that company.

On Monday evening, Quint Coppi and Matt Troutman will join me in a discussion of this book but I know already that Witness has strongly affected them too. One of this trio of readers is in his 70’s, one in his 50’s, one in his 20’s – that alone says much about the book’s appeal and force. But happily much more will be said about Witness then…and, my guess is, for as long as any of us has the desire to talk about good books.

I’ll be visiting Witness again, probably soon and with frequency thereafter. And I’m quite sure readers of The Book Den will note those visits.