One day, while trying to straighten up her elderly father's apartment, Franks discovered Nazi military paraphernalia, inspiring the Pulitzer-winning reporter and novelist (Wild Apples) to investigate what he really did during the Second World War. The painstaking inquiries are hampered by his reluctance to discuss his work in military intelligence, attached to the navy's Bureau of Ordnance. Some of that reluctance may have to do with the onset of dementia tearing away his memories, but he's also profoundly traumatized by some of his missions. In one moving passage, he is persuaded to describe his experience as one of the first American observers at a liberated concentration camp, every sentence still painful to get out even 50 years later. As Franks perseveres with her questions, she begins to understand how those experiences shaped their disintegrating postwar family life, but she acknowledges how difficult it is to achieve closure with this past, especially when she's afraid to confront the reality of his present condition. Even the most painful moments -- as when she throws a particularly harrowing revelation back in her father's face to score revenge for adolescent resentments -- are recounted with unflinching honesty as the military history takes a backseat to the powerful family drama. (Mar.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

At times this memoir veers into more than painful territory. It's positively agonizing to witness Franks interrogating her elderly father, especially when he's clearly suffering from dementia and even more so when he's diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Her desperate need to ferret out the truth, honed by years as a professional journalist, at times eerily echoes his memories of how information was obtained from prisoners of war -- not, I hasten to add, because she employs torture, but because she does use the manipulative techniques familiar to most interviewers to get answers.

What makes this memoir so affecting and readable is understanding, along with Franks, her need to get these answers. Her father's military activities may have been secret, but his war with himself and his family was all too open. Although there are sections of this book that might have been left out or more carefully edited (sometimes the long build-ups to small parcels of information seem tedious), in the end those sections feel quite authentic -- they're the "behind the scenes" of a reporter grappling with material. Watching a reporter as fine as Franks try and fail to fully give shape to two stories -- her own and her father's -- is painful. And beautiful. Just like mourning someone you loved very much.