Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns »

Cheryl L. Reed is a former editorial page editor, books editor, and reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and was previously a staff writer at several other newspapers.

Surprising. Provocative. Honest.

For Unveiled, reporter Cheryl Reed interviewed more than 300 nuns of diverse beliefs, lifestyles, and orders. She lived and prayed with them, witnessed their vows, mourned and celebrated with them, and asked questions no one had ever dared before: about love and sex, life and death, faith and joy, and loss and regret. In the process, Reed would discover more about motherhood, relationships, faith, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world.

Library Journal

Journalist Reed (Chicago Sun-Times) undertook a four-year journey to visit as many religious houses, convents, hospitals, and schools as she could in order to immerse herself in the "nun world." Her quest-to discover why a woman would choose a peculiar lifestyle, community, and commitment that function against the prevailing culture-serves as the meat of this participant-observer account. Reed details dozens of interviews with sisters who run the gamut from cloistered, habited nuns to social-justice activists to pro-life clinic workers. Each short account provides small insights into the calling and rationale behind this seemingly countercultural movement. Reed provides the questions as well as the answers and analysis, which sometimes begs further exploration (for example, why are habited orders growing?). She also tends to valorize religious life without adequately critiquing its negative impacts on the family, society, or even the individuals themselves. The work is not a systematic, academic consideration of the issues but is shaped more by the author's journalistic curiosity than by anthropological research techniques. That said, it is a remarkably accessible, very readable account. Recommended for women's studies and popular religion collections everywhere.-Sandra Collins, Univ. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.