John McPhee has an utterly unique topic here: Norton Dodge, a University of Maryland economics professor who spent nearly 30 years bringing out 9000 pieces of "unofficial" or "noncomformist" art by men and women living in the then-USSR. These artists were not officially sanctioned by the Kremlin and, as such, continued to paint in the 1950s through the 1980s in constant fear of incarceration in prisons or mental hospitals. This book could have benefited from better editing (I repeatedly found myself confused about which character represented the subject of a sentence), but that was a small distraction in the heroic tale of this intrepid collector and the indomitable artists he helped. And McPhee successfully got at Dodge's motivation for collecting, an elusive psychology to pinpoint. While this avocation fit into his overall packrat mentality, Dodge also sought to ensure the artists could continue to produce, even as he rescued an encyclopedic selection of their works, good, bad, and indifferent.