The Book

A Former Federal Prosecutor's Investigation of Life

A Memoir of Loss, Longing, Initiation, and Transcendence

By Henry J. Novak · Forthcoming

For most of his working life, Henry J. Novak investigated other people. He gathered the evidence, established the state of mind, and asked juries for a verdict, always from a careful distance.

Then, one February afternoon in Oakland in 1979, he walked into a room and was struck by something for which he had no category. He has spent the decades since trying to understand what happened to him.

This memoir is that investigation, turned at last on the one subject he could never stand apart from: his own life. It follows the losses he did not choose, the longing they left behind, the initiation that answered it, and a continuing life journey filled with practical wisdom.

The same method. A different case. And, for the first time, no verdict required.

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