Saying Lucinda Franks' book My Father's Secret War is revealing is like saying the sky is blue. Franks takes a journey she never expected and as a result comes full circle with her father - from adoring small child, to adolescent and adult estrangement, and finally to understanding that the man she calls her father had a profound past that deserves respect and, ultimately, adoration once again.

Her parents, both of whom grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, are the focus of the book. The impetus for writing it came about in the most mundane way. Franks opened a storage carton in her father's house one day, and "discovered some items so shocking" she says she could "hardly stand to hold them" in her hands. The box Franks stumbled across contained letters wrapped in red, white, and blue ribbon that her father had written her mother during his early service in WWII, but which did not hint at all about the horrors he saw and those he was forced to commit.

Franks paints a vivid portrait of her father, who had a fondness for collecting butterflies, and whose butterfly collection is now with New York's Museum of Natural History. The author also enjoyed stargazing with her father, who was a tender caregiver to her mother while she battled and eventually lost her fight with cancer.

All was not rosy in the Franks' household. Her father was also an alcoholic prone to fits of rage, as well as a philanderer. And then there was the stash of guns, hidden about the house, and his need to make his own bullets in the basement. As Franks grew older, she and her father simultaneously pulled away from each other. When she left to start her own life, she did not look back. She built a successful life, becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, as well as a wife and mother of two children.