Garver's memoir traces his evolution from a 1960s Student for a Democratic Society radical committed to socialist revolution to an American patriot trying to understand and explain China's quest for wealth and power. Several years early encounter with variants of dictatorship in the USSR and Eastern Europe, in China including both Taiwan Province and Mainland China, and Burma, shaped his rethinking of United States global containment. Over a career of thirty years at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Garver evolved from a revolutionary activist surveilled by the FBI to a leading academic authority on China's foreign relations, including Sino-Soviet/Russian, Sino-Indian, and Sino-Iranian relations.