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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 spoken about very little. More than just a World War II story, Through a Long Absence delves into one man's past to explore his personal wars: a stint as a child bootlegger, a marriage between newlyweds separated by continents and strained by years apart, and his struggle late in life with his own mind.