Clever Girl

June 2, 2003
Kessler (The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes) gamely attempts to create a true-life romantic spy-thriller from the life of Elizabeth Bentley, who in 1945 confessed to being a Soviet spy, implicated Julius Rosenberg and many others and set America off on its journey through McCarthyism. Unfortunately, Kessler's attempt to draw tension and romance from Bentley's life fails amid a clutter of cameos, unexplored details and a superficial rendering of early Communist history in the U.S. Bentley is certainly an intriguing subject. A descendant of Puritans and educated at Vassar, she joined the Communist Party while a graduate student at Columbia in the Depression. She soon became a covert agent and fell in love with her KGB contact, Jacob Golos. When Golos died in her apartment and Bentley's position with the Russians deteriorated, she reached out to the FBI. Kessler is a fine writer, but her subjects just don't cooperate. Bentley's "romance" with the homely, secretive Golos is hardly romantic, and much early American Communist history is still obscured beneath the shroud of secrecy under which it operated. Finally, Bentley appears to have left little behind to aid in reliably reconstituting her life. Despite Kessler's best efforts, the result falls short as spy thriller, as biography and as history. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Sandy Dijkstra.
(Aug. 8)Forecast:There seems to be a minor revival of interest in Bentley. Last October, the University of North Carolina Press published another biography,
Red Spy Queen by Kathryn Olmstead.

May 1, 2003
By the mid-1930s, the Russians had discovered that it was relatively easy to spy on Americans in our open society. Like countless others, Elizabeth Bentley, a New Englander educated at Vassar College, became a committed Communist in response to the economic inequities so apparent in Depression-era America. She fell in love with a Russian agent and during the early 1940s began providing secret government documents to her Soviet mentors as their spy named "clever girl." When her lover suddenly died, Bentley was no longer considered reliable by the Soviets, who marginalized her. The heartbroken Bentley contacted the FBI in 1945 and began exposing her fellow spies. The Rosenbergs were just two of the dozens she fingered during her testimony before congressional committees. Kessler, who directs the graduate program in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Oregon, has written a spellbinding tale of a woman who fell prey to her idealism and was then swept up in the furor of the Red Scare. This book is a worthy complement to Marcia and Thomas Mitchell's recent The Spy Who Seduced America, which told a similar tale about Judith Coplon. Recommended for most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/03.]-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2003
It only sounds like fiction: Bentley, known as the "Red Spy Queen," ran two successful spy rings in America and handed off U.S. secrets to her lover in the KGB. Then she turned coat and starting naming names, setting back Soviet espionage for years. Kessler is the author of numerous books, including the best-selling The Happy Bottom Riding Club. With a six-city author tour.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.