The 1950 espionage case of Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed British and American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, touched off a witch hunt in the United States that led to the capture of the Rosenbergs and many other alleged spies. The case fueled the fires of national concern over communism, Soviet espionage, internal subversion, and security in the nuclear age. Robert C. Williams has tenaciously retraced Fuchs's trail from Nazi Germany to Britain, Canada, Los Alamos, and finally to Dresden, where Fuchs now lives the life of a successful retired nuclear physicist. In his search Williams has not only uncovered Fuchs's personal story but has also established that his espionage was part of a much larger Soviet effort to penetrate and control British intelligence.

Klaus Fuchs had access to the most highly classified secrets of the wartime Manhattan Project. Cleared eight times by British security, and consequently accepted without investigation by the Americans, Fuchs worked in a hermetic world of security through secrecy—a world whose rules he publicly defended and privately betrayed. He played his role carefully for almost a decade, passing classified information to Soviet intelligence through a German communist espionage ring that operated under the very nose of the British government during and after the war. As part of the secret Anglo-American bomb project, he brought to Britain—and gave to Russia—technological know-how that helped both countries develop their own A-bombs.

This first full-length portrait of Klaus Fuchs and his case, based in part on newly available American and British archives on the subject, is an exciting find for general readers in the history of science, espionage, World War II, and the Cold War. It will also be of high professional interest to historians and physicists.

In July 1964, after a decade of intense media focus on civil rights protest in the Jim Crow South, a riot in Harlem abruptly shifted attention to the urban crisis embroiling America's northern cities. On the Corner revisits the volatile moment when African American intellectuals were thrust into the spotlight as indigenous interpreters of black urban life to white America, and examines how three figures--Kenneth B. Clark, Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden--wrestled with the opportunities and dilemmas their heightened public statures entailed. Daniel Matlin locates in the 1960s a new dynamic that has continued to shape African American intellectual practice to the present day, as black urban communities became the chief objects of black intellectuals' perceived social obligations.

Black scholars and artists offered sharply contrasting representations of black urban life and vied to establish their authority as indigenous interpreters. As a psychologist, Clark placed his faith in the ability of the social sciences to diagnose the damage caused by racism and poverty. Baraka sought to channel black fury and violence into essays, poems, and plays. Meanwhile, Bearden wished his collages to contest portrayals of black urban life as dominated by misery, anger, and dysfunction.

In time, each of these figures concluded that their role as interpreters for white America placed dangerous constraints on black intellectual practice. The condition of entry into the public sphere for African American intellectuals in the post-civil rights era has been confinement to what Clark called "the topic that is reserved for blacks."