“My Father’s Secret War,” the haunting 2007 memoir by Lucinda Franks that was published earlier this month in paperback by Hyperion, is a sort of family detective story. The unsolved transgression starts out as an exasperating domestic issue — a daughter’s inability to connect emotionally with her dad — but finally widens out to encompass a real crime: the horrifying rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis.
Franks, a former New York Times reporter and the first female recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, tells her story in gentle, conversational prose. It’s an easy read, even though it’s hardly an easy subject; her father, as she discovers, was one of what Franks calls “the quiet heroes of WWII.” Unearthing his “secret war” requires the exercise of her journalistic skills, and later her emotional and spiritual ones too.