Erie, a gambler staying at a seedy hotel, reminisces with the night clerk about Hughie, the previous clerk, whose friendship gave Erie confidence.

This book chronicles the struggle among non-Communist leftists and liberals over American relations with the Soviet Union from 1939 through the 1950s. Few now care as passionately and as violently as people did then about Soviet-American relations. It was a time when friends became enemies, and others forged strange alliances, all in the name of commitments that today seem remote. A Better World evokes those times and their choices, and explains why these long-ago battles still arouse such deep feelings today - and should.Americans who were pro-Soviet without being members of the Communist...