Witness

Whittaker Chambers's memoir recounts his years as a committed Marxist, his time as an agent of the Soviet underground in the 1930s and the congressional testimony in 1948 that led to the indictment of Alger Hiss. It begins with a 21-page foreword written as a letter to his children, then drops into events around 1938 as Chambers defects and goes into hiding, before going back to his childhood and his path into the Communist movement. Later chapters cover his rise at Time magazine and the first months of the Hiss case, while the two Hiss trials get fewer than ten pages. Part autobiography and part warning about communism, it was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post before its 1952 release.

Marc Andreessen put it on the reading list in his Andreessen Horowitz post What I've Been Up To Lately.