Description: Tony himself was just turning seven when his father was first accused in 1948, an event made indelible by his father's absence from his birthday party. He tells here how he and his mother tried (with varying success) to cope with what was happening to them -- how the only job his mother could find was in the basement of a Doubleday bookstore (so as not to upset the customers), how even the New York Quaker chapter asked them to apply for membership at another time, but how the friends who did stick created a protective bubble around them that made life possible. And finally how almost miraculously Alger's letters and the prison visits brought Tony closer to his father than he had ever been, and how perhaps the whole experience gave Alger a humanity that he had previously lacked.

The View from Alger's Window is a revelatory opening into one of the defining episodes of the Cold War, poignantly evoking an entire era. It is also a record of a father's sensitive, almost superhuman efforts to make the unbearable bearable for his young son, and the son's moving and loving -- but always clear-eyed -- tribute to that father.

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