In the nineteen-eighties, an amateur historian of the Adirondacks recorded the fading memories of an aging woodsman and bootlegger, searching for details about the old-time fiddle player and rustic builder Fran Germaine. The woodsman's wild tales faded into dust more than once until the discovery of a diary kept by Rosalyn Orloff, the socialist writer and political theorist of the twenties and thirties, and reputed lover of the psychoanalyst Carl...