Emerging from the debacle that was the Trump Administration, Marie Yovanovitch had one chance in ‘Lessons from the Edge’ to go on the record about what kind of diplomat she is, so if there’s one flaw in her story, it’s a tendency to go into a bit too much detail about her various posts. Yovanovitch served in some of the most difficult American embassies on Earth: Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and finally Ukraine during her 33-year career. She documents her learning curve in the Foreign Service, her many adventures, and the misogyny she had to cope with (looking at you, Rex Tillerson). The daughter of Russian immigrants, “Masha” never loses her patriotism and her absolute admiration for the American system, especially as compared to some of the corrupt and chaotic places she served. Which made Donald Trump’s style of governance even more impossible for her to understand. She outlines in excruciating detail the dawning realization that not only was she being targeted by “Trump world,” but that her own State Department—in the person of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—had no intention of protecting her. The last part of the book narrates her attempts to navigate her way through the conspiracy theory she was caught up in, as Trump tried to lay the groundwork for discrediting Joe Biden and the 2020 election in advance. And here we are, almost two years later, coping with the fall-out from his willingness to win by any means necessary. Yovanovitch’s example stands as a heroic profile in courage and integrity for us to remember in the dark days to come.