The book by Igor Efimov, a famous writer and philosopher who emigrated to the United States almost forty years ago, talks about those aspects of the life of American society that are not visible to outsiders. It often turns out that behind the façade of a successful state, which claims to be the only pole of the political life of the planet, lies the most difficult problems and insoluble contradictions. The author’s view of the internal processes in American society is unique in its own way: on the one hand, it is a view from the inside, and on the other, a detached view, capable of balanced and even impartial judgments. The author consistently examines the most diverse aspects of social life - school, family, army, courts, advocacy, diplomacy, etc. - and draws disappointing conclusions. The root of the problems is the departure of American democracy from its ancestral principles, the capture and manipulation of public opinion by influential groups of lawyers, politicians and corporate representatives. The book will be extremely useful to the Russian reader not only because it will introduce him to the current American agenda and allow him to compare it with the domestic one, but also because it can warn against the mistakes that were made in the United States and which Russian society can still avoid.