A fascinating look at the lives of nuns by an award-winning investigative journalist UNVEILED - The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed When reporter Cheryl Reed set out to examine the lives of nuns, she was fulfilling a personal quest. She wanted to see for herself what was behind the mysterious image instilled by her Protestant upbringing and reinforced by Hollywood clichés, misguided speculation, and her Catholic friends’ childhood stories of unyielding figures in black. UNVEILED: The Hidden Lives of Nuns (Berkley Hardcover; March 2004; $24.95) is the culmination of Reed’s journalistic pursuit  of  the  truth  beneath  the  habit.  During   Reed’s research she interviewed more than three hundred different nuns of diverse beliefs and lifestyles—from cloistered and isolated to untraditional and activist—from more than fifty different orders across the country. Was the sisterhood still a viable option for women in today’s society? Why would so many women still enter strict, habited orders? How could they possibly exert their own identity in a world of such conformity? Why were they so willing to give up material pleasures, money, the company of men, and sex? The answers to these questions and many more, changed Reed’s perspective on nuns; they also changed her outlook on herself and her life. While researching UNVEILED Reed lived and prayed with the nuns; she observed their daily lives, and participated in silent worship. She witnessed their vow ceremonies, mourned with them, celebrated and drank beer with them. They welcomed questions no one had ever dared to ask before. Reed listened to their personal stories and candid musings about love and sex, life and death, faith and joy, and loss and regret. Reed’s four-year journey had her criss-crossing the country, living and praying with nuns from coast to coast.
	Some of her extraordinary experiences include: Helping to deliver a baby at a nun-operated birthing center on the Texas/Mexico border Discovering the secrets of celibacy from young, nuns among the wheat fields of Indiana Discovering the origin of the ruler-smacking nun icon while teaching school with habited nuns on Arizona’s Indian Reservations Sleeping with homeless women at a shelter run by feisty nuns in the inner-city of Chicago, where she captured a famous nun’s last words before a stroke robbed her of her speech Penetrating a strictly habited cloister on the outskirts of St. Louis where the nuns shave their heads and beat their bare bottoms Witnessing protesters in Minneapolis where sisters were arrested for trespassing on the grounds of a weapons manufacturer In the end the nuns that Reed approached with suspicion and curiosity ended up teaching her more about motherhood, relationships, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world.
	In UNVEILED, Cheryl Reed has succeeded in opening up the doors to a once closed world - one often misrepresented and almost always misunderstood – to present nuns not as stoic icons of secrecy and ritual but simply as women who have chosen an independent path, and who now offer themselves as guides to their fascinating, surprising, and enlightening interior lives. About the Author: Cheryl L. Reed’s articles have appeared in Mother Jones, U.S. News and World Report, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Salon.com, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, among others. She’s won many awards including Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondent Association. She is currently an investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and lives in Chicago. UNVEILED: The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed Berkley Hardcover; March 2004 ISBN: 0-425-19511-2; $24.95 Penguin Group (USA) Inc. is the U.S. member of the internationally renowned Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) is one of the leading U.S. adult and children’s trade book publishers, owning a wide range of imprints and trademarks, including Berkley Books, Dutton, Frederick Warne, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Grosset & Dunlap, New American Library, Penguin, Philomel, Riverhead Books and Viking, among others. The Penguin Group is part of Pearson plc, the international media company.