In the 1800s, nuns moved west with the frontier, building hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid during the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes during the California Gold Rush, and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals on both sides of the Civil War.
In the 1900s, nuns built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems, and brought the Catholic Church into the Civil Rights movement. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 65,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine.
Nuns became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. Sweeping in its scope and insight, Sisters reveals the spiritual wealth that these women invested in America.

"The best book yet on the threat to American business posed by industrial spies. . . . Historians may well turn to Fialka's book for a quick study."—John Mintz, Washington Post

In this action-filled journey through tomorrow's headlines, award-winning journalist John Fialka reveals a secret war that jeopardizes the economic security of the United States and the livelihood of millions of Americans. The battlefield is now economic rather than ideological, but espionage in the 1990s springs directly from the ruins of the Cold War spy regimes. Newly configured, the covert operations of America's enemies-and friends-threaten to hollow out the U.S. economy and siphon away the jobs and technologies we need to remain competitive in the twenty-first century.

From Russia's brazen shopping tours for U.S. secrets to the subtle art of technology "tunneling" by the Japanese, this book illuminates a loss that is widely felt, but not often seen or understood. Fialka's incisive reporting and trenchant analysis expose an attack on the American economy so deadly as to constitute a time-lapse Pearl Harbor; his book outlines the hard choices we must make if we are to survive.

"A timely, tough-minded, and persuasively documented reminder that some of the Global Village's states do not play as fair as others."—Kirkus Reviews

"Reads] like a spy thriller. . . . A revealing book that we ignore at our peril."—Publishers Weekly

"Anyone concerned about America's economic future, our declining standard of living, and the battle for world markets would be well advised to read this book."—Peter Schweizer, Raleigh News and Observer