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    My Father's Secret War: A Memoir
    My Father's Secret War: A Memoir
    My Father's Secret War: A Memoir
    Audiobook12 hours

    My Father's Secret War: A Memoir

    Written by Lucinda Franks

    Narrated by Joyce Bean

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life as he became afflicted with Alzheimer's. His exploits revealed a man of remarkable bravado-posing as a Nazi guard, slipping behind enemy lines to blow up ammunition dumps, and being flown to one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies to report on the atrocities found there.

    My Father's Secret War is an intimate account of Franks coming to know her own father after years of estrangement. Looking back at letters he had written her mother in the early days of WWII, Franks glimpses a loving man full of warmth. But after the grimmest assignments of the war his tone shifts, settling into an all-too-familiar distance. Franks learns about him-beyond the alcoholism and adultery-and comes to know the man he once was.

    Her story is haunting, and beautifully told, even as the tragedy becomes clear: Franks finally comes to know her father, but only as he is slipping further into his illness. Lucinda Franks understands her father as the disease claims him. My Father's Secret War is a triumph of love over secrets, and a tribute to the power of the connection of family.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 15, 2007
    ISBN9781400173815
    My Father's Secret War: A Memoir
    Author

    Lucinda Franks

    Lucinda Franks is the author of the memoirs My Father's Secret War and Timeless: Love, Morganthau, and Me. A former staff writer for The New York Times, she has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the life and death of Diana Oughton, a member of the Weathermen. A graduate of Vassar College, Franks lives in New York City. Her husband, the former longtime district attorney for New York County Robert M. Morgenthau, died in 2019.

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    Reviews for My Father's Secret War

    3.5/5

    60 ratings11 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I found this "brillian and haunting memoir" a huge disappointment. Started off sucking me in as I was interested in the story and the author (a Pulitzer Prize winner) but did not like the way she told the story. Found it a bit self-serving and egocentric. Who cares if she and her father found love after all those years? I wanted a real spy story and it was not that at all.
    • 2/5
      Interesting. I learned a few things about World War II.
    • 2/5
      I really liked the "meaty" part of the story, about this guy's training and secret activities in WWII, but this darn book is written in a diary-like, free form, way and that was just terrible. So much extraneous chit chat between the good pieces: how her kid like animals, what they're eating for breakfast, about the guy's favorite comfy chair... gah!!!!! just skip the extra chit chat about the kids and the car and the pets and where he slept! I'm only about 1/2 way thru and I don't know if I can make it for the rest of the story.
    • 5/5
      "Bullets and butterflies, such a bizarre combination of hobbies. I let the lead slugs sift through my hand."This was an amazing book. It's as much about the strained relationship between father and daughter as it is about his "secret war," and it's incredibly moving. Tom Franks was a huge hero of WWII, but he's nobody you've ever heard of, in fact his name is practically wiped out of the records. Practically everything he did he was sworn to secrecy about, and those things, plus keeping them locked up tight, ate him alive for the rest of his life, destroying his relationships with everyone around him. Late in his life, his daughter (who has had a deeply rocky relationship with him since she hit her teens) is cleaning up his home, going through boxes to dispose of unneeded junk taking up needed space, when she discovers some shocking items from the war; this prompts her to begin a personal crusade to find out just who was this man who was her father, and just what part did he play in the war. The book is essentially the record of these years of her struggle with the search and her struggle with family relationships."Now, when there's finally nothing left, the silence is at least enough."
    • 3/5
      One woman's journalistic endeavors to uncover her father's secret contribution to WWII. Light, easy read with bits of history and dysfunction - truly echoes the phrase secrets will make you sick!!
    • 4/5
      In war men do despicable things and it changes them forever. Lucinda Franks' book about her father is at time moving, at times frustrating, and always interesting. It is the story of a woman coming to grips with the father she has really never known because he is secretive, quiet and alcoholic. They have had a difficult relationship all her life, and toward the end of his, she tries to find out who he is and how he became that person. Through several years of searching and questioning, she gets the answers to her questions, but she has to live with her decision to dig so deeply into her father's past. There were parts of the book that hit close to home, and I had an understanding of what and why she was doing what she did, but in the end, I don't think the book lived up to my expectations of the work of a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Still, it is a quick enjoyable read, and helps tell the story of a generation of soldiers who went to war, made promises and kept them--long after the need for their vow of silence was over. It is the story of many families who have had a loved one come home from war a different person. It is as true for soldiers who returned from Vietnam, Iraq, Korea or Afghanistan as it is those who returned from the horrors of WWII.
    • 2/5
      Her father was cold and remote; gradually she finds out about what he did during WWII - he was with the battalion that first opened a concentration camp, worked undercover doing various things. It doesn't change their relationship, ultimately, but she gets some peace by finding out what had influenced him.
    • 3/5
      We read this book in our book group, and it got uneven responses. I thought the conclusion was cathartic and resolved a number of the threads that had developed throughout the memoir. Because of the effectiveness of the conclusion, I found the book as a whole satisfying and complete.
    • 4/5
      An interesting look into the mind and strength of character of a man who kept so many secrets from his family because he believed he was protecting them, and because he was told not to divulge certain information. It brought home to me, how we sometimes think we know a person, but we really just know as much as they want us to know, and only a side of them that they're willing to include us in. How sad must it have been for Cindy's father to be constantly pushed away by her in her misguided belief that her father didn't care about the family, because of the secrets he was compelled to keep.
    • 3/5
      In the end, not a great book by a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Times. Seemed like she went overboard trying to make her father's secret life during the war more important than it was.
    • 4/5
      A daughter's discover that there was much more to her father than she had originally thought. She gradually lets go of old, petty resentments and begins to learn more about the father that she had really never known, A WWII spy who witnessed and survived many atrocities and harrowing events.