This romance novel, although fiction, is based on the true life adventures of the author. It is about real life, but a life few people know exists, and even fewer get to experience. The narrator is a brother-in-arms and brother-in-spirit of the protagonist, Nick Malenko, who sets out to tell these scandalous tales for Nick would never do so himself, disdaining publicity and public acclaim. Nick is a young man who happens to be smart, good-looking, a rebel at heart, and self-disciplined because of his upbringing. He is an athlete but also a voracious reader, loves learning and worships at the altar of Venus. He goes to the best schools but he rebels early. He marries a woman of color against the convention of the day. He has decided that his goal in life is to become the commander of a parachute infantry battalion in the Regular Army of the United States, a goal he exceeds in time. He graduates as a distinguished military graduate and is commissioned in the regular army. Because he is quadrilingual and his educaton and training, the three letter agencies become interested in him. He enters the shadowy world of intelligence. And then his troubles begin. He is bright but lacks the experience to be wise. So he mistakes sex and passion for love, learning for wisdom and in order to gain a measure of immortality he plunges into one adventure after another thinking that thumbing his nose at fate will bring him immortality. In both war-time and cold-war settings he plunges from one adventure to another, from one romance to another. The settings are bedrooms and battlefields and the corridors of power in Vietnam: Korea; Washington, D.C.; Germany; San Antonio, Texas; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Los Angeles, California. Many years after he started on his journey he realizes that all he was searching for he has had at home. He finds that he had love all along, and immortality through his loving family and finally, finally, wisdom comes. His long-suffering wife used to say to him: "In your relentless search you create great upheaval and great stress for those around you. Being married to you is madness." That is why his friends called him "The Mad Russian" or "The Madman." That is the reason for the book title.