They say it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. You think so? Ask Frank Martinelli, and he might tell you different. It all began with the disappearance of his daughter Jennifer 20 years ago. She was on her way back to college and never made it. A year later a young girl named Rachel left Frank with an awful secret right before she died. The losses kept piling up. Soon his marriage was added to the toll. After that he just quit trying to make sense of things. He put in his time and retired, a hollowed out man living a half-empty glass of a life, a story with an...

Anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows that Captain Ahab lost his life-and the lives of the crew of the Pequod-chasing the white whale, Moby Dick. The only survivor was a sailor named Ishmael. What you may not remember is that Ahab was survived by a young wife and child, Hannah and Thomas. Ahab's life has ended, but their lives must now go on without him. They move to a small town near Boston, where she meets and marries Aaron Stoddard. The years go by and Thomas Stoddard grows into a young man. Ahab's memory recedes deeper and deeper into a past seldom revisited by either mother or son. When...

In April 1968, we were a country at war with ourselves and increasingly with a small country halfway around the world: Vietnam. I don't recall ever thinking about Vietnam when I started college in 1963. By 1968, it was all any of us could think about. The book begins with my being drafted into the Army and ends with my return to civilian life. I wrote this for my grandchildren, but it will give anyone some sense of what it was like to serve a tour of duty in Vietnam. The job I had gave me an excellent overview of how the gears of the war machine meshed together. I have tried to convey this as...