"By the time she arrived in Belvidere, Illinois, and started working as a farmhand, Jennie had a new name and a new identity . . . Albert D. J. Cashier. In 1861, the winds of war blew through the United States. Jennie Hodgers, a young immigrant from Ireland, moved west to Illinois and soon had a new name and a new identity--Albert D. J. Cashier. Like many other young men, Albert joined the Union Army. Though the smallest soldier in his company, Albert...

"On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove -- to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife -- that the hours of his life belonged to himself alone. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn...