As the generation of Americans who fought World War II passes into history, there seems to be a quickening of interest in who they were and what they did. The proof of this is in the numerous books and documentary films that have appeared in the past 10 to 20 years.

"Full Fathom Five: A Daughter's Search" by Maine writer and teacher Mary Lee Coe Fowler is the latest in this line of questioning volumes.

Fowler, the third child of James and Rachel Coe, never met her father, who was Commander of the submarine Cisco. A war hero formerly in command of the Skipjack (and famous in the Navy for his "toilet paper" memo with "a sample of material requested" posted to the office of Navy Supply), Commander Coe and the Cisco were lost on their first patrol, probably in the Sulu Sea, in autumn 1943.

Rachel Coe remarried badly, as it turned out. The second husband refused to have Jim Coe spoken about, and to protect the children, Rachel complied until a violent confrontation ended the marriage. Even then, the story of Jim remained untold, and the author's young adult anti-war activism did not lend itself to research a shadowy military father.

As one can imagine, "Full Fathom Five," packed as it is with emotion, has the potential of slipping the tracks from a work of self-awareness into self-pity, of interest to only the family or a limited audience. What saves it and elevates it to a work of universal value and substance is the research and rigor of organization.

The reader senses a curiosity about a father made remote by a variety of circumstances, both having to do with attitudes in Fowler's childhood home and with national point of view. As the author reports, "I realized I had probably misread (my mother) all these years as 'insensitive' about Jim's death. This is a common complaint among fellow orphans of World War II at the conferences I've attended: That the widows never expressed grief over the lost fathers, that they simply moved on."

Indeed, before taking on the book, Fowler really didn't know other war orphans or half-orphans. In the process of her remarkably thorough research, she met many. She interviewed men and women who knew Jim Coe very well, including Roberta McCain, mother of Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican presidential candidate.

Together with family photographs and official reports, a fascinating career Navy man with strong anti-bureaucratic tendencies emerges. So too does a remarkable love story cut short by war and early death, and forced into the vault of memory.

Writing anyone's life story is a daunting task if done well. Even when a subject has left a substantial paper trail or made a vivid public impression, really good biographies are few and far between. This is one of the good ones. Fowler did not set out to make a hero of her father. To the contrary, she began as an anti-war activist who resented war for erasing her father from the family memory.

In this detective story, the reader moves from discovery to discovery, and the shattered Coe family comes back to its pre-war shape. For the author, it is a personal catharsis and understanding. For the general reader, the book shows a cost of the Second World War that was never tallied up on the butcher bill.

Women lost bread-winner husbands and were suddenly left to care for families on their own hook. Sadly, marriage was one of the few immediate options at the time, and even when it worked out well, husband number two was probably not fond of hearing about his new bride's first love. Hence, photographs, uniforms and other mementoes, like those in the author's family, were relegated to the attic.

On the larger stage, post-war Americans did not want to dwell on unfortunate aspects of a successful conflict, such as lost submarines or shattered families. This was an era of positive thinking, go-getting, big cars and a house for every proper family. Unpleasant truths were simply not...