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Arizona Sen. John McCain spent his Memorial Day in Syria. As NPR's Jonathan Blakley reports from Beirut, McCain's spokesman says the senator crossed into northern Syria from Turkey to meet with rebels in the country, ripped apart by the 2-year conflict turned civil war.

The Daily Beast reports McCain was with Brig. Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Free Syrian Army, and met with rebels for a few hours before going back to Turkey. The Daily Beast added:

"Idris praised the McCain visit and criticized the Obama administration's Syria policy in an exclusive interview Monday with The Daily Beast. 'The visit of Senator McCain to Syria is very important and very useful especially at this time,' he said. 'We need American help to have change on the ground; we are now in a very critical situation.' "

In the fall of 1945, my father was honorably discharged from the Navy. He was one of the lucky ones. He'd served on a destroyer escort during the war, first in convoys dodging U-boats in the Atlantic and then in the Pacific where his ship, the USS Schmitt, shot down two kamikaze planes. My dad always kept a framed picture of the Schmitt above his dresser, but, like most men of his generation, he didn't talk a lot about his war years.

One story he did tell me, because it haunted him, was about a shipmate who was lost on duty one night. That sailor had told the other guys on watch that he was going to the galley to get some cherry pie and coffee; while he was crossing the deck a wave smashed into the ship and washed him overboard. The captain, against regulations, ordered the ship's lights turned on to search for the sailor in the black waters. That poor guy was never found. Like I said, my dad was one of the lucky ones.

And how special he must have felt in late December of 1945, when a letter from Washington, D.C., came for him at his sister's house in Llanerch Hills, Pa. My father was living with his sister and her family because, by then, both of his parents had died. The letter, signed in fountain pen, was from the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. It began:

My dear Mr. Corrigan:

I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed. I have done so because, without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy's pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and to remain with you always.

In the classic American story, opportunity is always in front of you. You finish school, find a job, buy a home and start a family; it's a rosy dreamscape.

But that world is one-dimensional. Income inequality is just about as American as baseball and apple pie. And though the economy has improved in the past few years, the unemployment rate for black Americans, now 13.2 percent, is about double that for white Americans.

“ Whites disproportionally hold the best jobs, the jobs with the highest incomes, and we still live in a quite segregated society.

The writer Pearl S. Buck emerged into literary stardom in 1931 when she published a book called The Good Earth. That story of family life in a Chinese village won the novelist international acclaim, the Pulitzer, and eventually, a Nobel Prize. Her upbringing in China as the American daughter of missionaries served as inspiration for that novel and many, many others; by her death in 1973, Buck had written more than 100 books, including 43 novels.

Last December, Buck's son Edgar Walsh — who now manages her literary estate — received an email with some unexpected news. A 44th novel by his mother had been discovered in Texas.

"Someone, and I do not know who, took the manuscript from the house in which [Buck] died in Vermont and went away with it," Walsh says. "Whoever that person was wound up in Texas, rented a storage unit and put the manuscript in there. And that's where it was found."

The family had some trouble over the years, he tells NPR's Jacki Lyden, but things have been pretty good lately. His mother's work experienced a resurgence of attention in 2004 when Oprah selected The Good Earth for her book club.

Walsh didn't know Buck had spent her final years writing this novel.

"And I certainly didn't know someone had spirited the manuscript out of the home in which she had lived her last years in Vermont," he says, "and had concealed it from me and the family for 40 years."

Two manuscripts of the novel, titled The Eternal Wonder, were found — one typewritten and one written in the author's own handwriting. Fortunately, Walsh says, the estate was able to acquire the manuscripts without too much trouble.

"I contacted an attorney in Philadelphia [named] Peter Hearn," Walsh says. Hearn had helped Walsh with other disputes over Buck's work. "And [I] said, 'We will not give her what she's asking for, but we will pay her a modest sum of money, and we want it returned immediately.' That worked."

More About Pearl Buck:

The Two-Way

Book News: Newly Found Pearl Buck Novel To Be Published This Fall