This book is a revealing insiders' account of the deteriorating special relationship between the United States and Romania in the last years of the Ceausescu dictatorship. The authors were the two chief diplomatic actors in the drama, on opposite sides of the dialogue in Bucharest: Roger Kirk as U.S. ambassador to Romania, Mircea Raceanu as the Romanian Foreign Ministry's chief of U.S. and Canadian affairs. They document the tangled web of state-to-state relations in a way few others could and personalize otherwise impersonal diplomacy, offering vivid portraits of the major players and an invaluable historical record.