This book relates the life, education and experiences of a Minnesotan who fell in love with physics early in life, went to Princeton and was educated by former students of Enrico Fermi and others who had worked on the development of nuclear weapons. He then spent a year in Moscow participating in the first year of the scientific exchange program initiated by Kennedy and Kruschev, where he encountered an American defector and had other interesting experiences with Russians and with the KGB. He ended up working at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, funded by the government for the development of nuclear fusion for energy production.