One wonders whether all the effort and negotiation that were necessary to make possible this volume in the University of Chicago Press's series on "The United States in the World" were really worth it. The subtitle gives the key to the book's message and to its interpretation of 60 years of Soviet-American relations: a devotion to peaceful coexistence on the one side, and a striving for imperialist advantage on the other. Yet if this is not history, it is lively writing, much better than the usual canned output, by two Russians who know America well.