Until the day of Merriwethers departure from the housea month after his divorcethe Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one we read on the first page of Other Mens Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Sterns novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, the origin of so much story and disorder, can be.