True Believer, Kati Marton
True Believer, Kati Marton
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True Believer
Stalin's Last American Spy

Author: Kati Marton

Narrator: Amanda Carlin

Unabridged: 8 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/06/2016


Synopsis

“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. 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. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs and many in Field’s generation were seduced by its siren song. 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. True Believer is supported by unprecedented access to Field family correspondence, Soviet Secret Police records, and reporting on key players from Alger Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and World War II spy master, “Wild Bill” Donovan—to the most sinister of all: Josef Stalin. “Relevant today as a tale of fanaticism and the lengths it can take one to” (Publishers Weekly), True Believer is “riveting reading” (USA TODAY), an astonishing real-life spy thriller, filled with danger, misplaced loyalties, betrayal, treachery, and pure evil, with a plot twist worthy of John le Carré.

About Kati Marton

Kati Marton is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An award-winning former NPR correspondent and ABC News bureau chief in Germany, she was born in Hungary and lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Esil on August 31, 2016

The True Believer tells what should be an interesting story, but it made for mostly quite a dull read. The book is about Noel Field, an American recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union -- who ended up living his later years in communist Hungary. Marton depicts Field as hapless and naive, and blindly......more

Goodreads review by Carlos on March 21, 2017

Very dry book, recommend it only if you truly interested in the Cold War era and its ramifications all through out Easter Europe. The subject is a lower American bureaucrat who was enticed early on by the Utopia that was communism in the early 1930's , it was a faith that would prove to be his undoi......more

Goodreads review by Kisxela on August 09, 2022

I recommend this book to all those who want to know more about the functioning of dictatorships, fanatical faith, and the history of our recent past. Thanks to Kati Marton's thorough research, we can gain a lot of important knowledge while reading the book. Especially the last third became impossibl......more

Goodreads review by Bill on January 24, 2017

There was a great story hidden in a poorly written book. The saga of Noel Field is incredible --- among other things, it shows that people can convince themselves that night is day and day is night. The quick story: While employed at the U.S. Department of State in the 1930s, Field acted as a Soviet......more

Goodreads review by Emma on February 15, 2023

Excellent. Sticks to the point and moves the story along without unnecessary digressions. It's very well written, and reminds us of a fascinating bit of history that often gets ignored or forgotten - i.e., how many Americans who were in positions where they should have known better got swept up by t......more