Francine Prose traces her relationship as a young writer in San Francisco with Anthony Russo, the co-conspirator with Daniel Ellsberg in the release of the Pentagon Papers that exposed government duplicity in regard to the Vietnam War. Prose captured the scattered and confused qualities of the mid-1970s, when the idealism of the 1960s has waned but nothing has yet replaced it. Traditions of friendship, love, and loyalty had been overturned, and people were making it us as they went along, sometimes with hurtful results. Falling in something like love with Russo, Prose finds herself experiencing a sort of vertigo and she uses Alfred Hitchcock’s film throughout as a metaphor for what she felt in this period. The Russo she describes is damaged, but somewhat indestructible, despite a prison term, mental illness, and the lasting paranoia from contact with truly diabolical government forces. Prose only alludes to the current administration, but one can only imagine what sort of destruction and damage will be left behind by this government. A fascinating, at times heartbreaking story, although Prose may not be the best reader of her work.