Against the backdrop of World War II, Joy Passanante's touching new book, Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father's Wars, is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and two first-generation American families. Told through her father's eyes--drawing on hundreds of his letters to his beloved wife, his four-volume wartime diary, and his paintings--Passanante masterfully recreates his wartime journey and physically retraces his steps more than sixty years later in an attempt to understand a time in her parents' lives that they'd...