Customer Reviews

My Father's Secret War

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Reading "My Father's Secret War" one can't quite accept that daddy was an agent of the OSS. His daughter decided he was and with leading questions managed to get a confession- as he was slipping into dementia. What is interesting is that on August 14, 2008 the National Archives announced the oppening of the personnel files of all Second World War OSS agents. Thomas Franks was not listed which appears to blow her story. Perhaps the book be reclassified as "fiction."

More of a cartharsis, than a novel. The author seeks to understand her father and the family's intricate web of family dynamics. Unfortunately, she used the facts of her father's life to twist her present view of reality. Her Dad was a spy ( of sorts) during WWII. She uses this as a catapult to explain every move he makes for the next 50 years. She is full of excuses for his failings. His "spy job" made him an alcoholic, his spy job made him a bad husband, his spy job let him fail in business, his spy job made him a poor father to her, etc. You get the picture. On top of this story is another story in which the author, seeks to understand herself. Unfortunately, she is very shallow and self centered, lives a life of luxury and seems more interested in how others perceive her, than in really getting to the roots causes of her life. I bought the book because I thought I'd get a good historical WWII biography written by a Pulitzer Prize winnner. Did I mention the Pulitzer was written due to her getting a byline in a small article she wrote by chance decades ago. The writing wasn't clear, crisp or even insightful. The story is about an upper class family without any real point and the writing is insipid. I wouldn't even suggest it as a library book. Sorry.

Personally I did not care for this memoir. I was able to relate
to some of problems with the author's father. The book was too
descriptive and boring. The ending could have been a lot shorter.

The book was interesting, in parts. Ms Frank's mother was one of the leading lights of our community. It was unkind of "Cindy' to make fun of her fat legs as Lorraine sat on the filing cabinet. The day her daughter won the Pulitzer there was no more proud mother on this earth!

As I approach the the age of my parents when they died, I've realized I know very little about them. I accepted them, as children do, as always having been the way they were when I was growing up. I think it is in this spirit of questioning that Lucinda Franks Morgenthau wrote this memoir. It is often the things that are never spoken of that influence lives: death, war, affairs that turned out badly. To accept and forgive, you have to understand, and for us children of the 1960s with parents who lived through WW II, that is investigative work.
Ms. Franks is no longer a journalist of hard news, but she has done the hard work of investigating her father's war work, and her own heart. Bravo!

This is a fascinating story of a journey into the past-- a journalist's attempt to recreate the history of her mysterious and troubled father. Lucinda Franks struggles to understand her father's history and her own complex feelings about this fascinating man. She learns about his extraordinary experiences during World War II and begins to understand the ways in which the war changed and marked him-- how he continued to carry the war inside him long after he returned home to wife and family. A moving and nuanced memoir.

This is an excelling read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in American experiences in WWII, as well as father-daughter relationships. IT is a very personal book, and the author paints a revealing portrait of both her father and herself. The writing is strong and crisp, with occasionally lovely turns of phrases. The story itself is moving and concerns the author's memories of her father and her own growth as she came to better understand various forces that shaped his life. As she uncovers her father's activities as a spy in WWII, she gradually coming to a more mature understanding of his limitations. I enjoyed the book, and felt I learned some new things about WWII in the process.

I was lucky enough to hear Lucinda Franks speak on a recent book tour in Lowell, Mass, and was immediately drawn to her story. In reading the book, I recalled Milton's line, "They also serve who only stand and wait." The war in which her father served so heroically never really ended for him. It took a psychic toll on Tom Franks that was later to affect Lucinda and his entire family. They all paid the price for his service to his country. For many years, his paranoid behavior, the guns hidden all around the house, and his secretiveness was a mystery to the author. With the skill of a world class reporter who risked her own life in Northern Ireland in the worst days of "The Troubles," Lucinda Franks begins to unravel her father's story. With war records from The National Archives spread all over the floor before her, she pieces the facts together. Gradually, her father gives up the details of his secret war. His presence at the liberation of the first concentration camp at Ordruf is detailed, a scene of such horror that it alone would explain the nightmares that wracked her father and that woke her as a young girl to his voice in the next room shouting "No! No!" Later, he gives up his darkest secret to her,one that has haunted him since 1945. The fact that he did his duty was never enough to console him, and he lived with the burden of guilt.

A friend of my father's died recently, and it was not until I read his obituary that I discovered he had been at Iwo Jima. So many of these veterans carried their wars to their graves, especially those who served the OSS. Lucinda Franks has done those veterans, and all of us, a service by rescuing her father's story, and by illustrating in beautiful prose the cost of war to all of us.

My father rarely talked about his experience in World War II and I never really asked him about it. Now that he's gone, I wish I had. Lucinda Franks asked her father, and he often demurred; but she persevered and was able to piece together a revealing story about the real horrors of war and the effect it has on its participants.

Franks is an insightful observer and a talented writer: I was caught up in her quest to understand her father as he slipped away into old age. This is a very personal look at family dynamics in "The Greatest Generation." I found it captivating.